John Hare’s God’s Command, 8.2.2, “Jonathan Haidt”

Hare wishes to discuss Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. The key is that Haidt defends the view we saw in Arnhart that evolution has given us a “groupish” attachment, one that is designed to make groups more effective at competing with other groups. Haidt goes on immediately to ask: “But is that really such a bad thing overall, given how shallow our care for strangers is in the first place? Might the world be a better place if we could greatly increase the care people get within their existing groups and nations while slightly decreasing the care they get from strangers in other groups and nations?”

His conclusion is that it would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. But rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups—amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders may be the most we can accomplish. Religion is, he thinks, the crucial social practice that enables group formation. But should we really expect religion to turn people into unconditional altruists, ready to help strangers under any circumstances? Whatever Christ said about the Good Samaritan who helped an injured Jew, if religion is a group-level adaptation, then it should produce parochial altruism.

Our genes, on his view, under the prompting of religion give us parochial altruism, but not disinterested benevolence, or the kind of care that the Good Samaritan gave to the injured Jew. What is strikingly absent in Haidt’s account, however, is any exploration of the universalizing tendency of some religion. Religion is treated throughout as a “hive switch,” a group-level adaptation that gives us cohesion within the group together with competition against those outside it. But one theme of Hare’s book has been that we can find within the Abrahamic faiths not only tribal loyalty but divine commands that tell us to love or show mercy to the enemy and stranger and give us resources for doing so. The three arguments from the first chapter reveal an internal structure to this form of religion. If we are going to talk about the contribution of religion to morality, we need to take these features into account.

In 2001 Haidt published an influential article called “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” In it he argued it was a mistake to follow the lead of Lawrence Kohlberg (and behind him, Kant, and behind Kant, Plato) in valorizing reason as the source of moral judgment. Rather, to use a different metaphor that’s central in The Righteous Mind, we should think of emotion as the elephant and reason as a rider who is controlled by the elephant. The contrast is with Plato in the Phaedrus (246a), who thinks of reason as the charioteer, controlling the two horses of ambition and passion. On Haidt’s picture there is nothing controlling emotion except other emotions.

He doesn’t contrast emotions with cognition he thinks emotions are in fact “filled with cognition,” and he moves to saying that the contrast is between two forms of cognition, which he now calls “intuition” and “reasoning.” But this is still confusing, because intuition has often been thought of as a kind of reasoning. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between nous (intuitive reason) and dianoia (discursive reason). One takes time, the other doesn’t, but both are rational. Haidt has misunderstood Plato here, thinking Plato’s telling us in the Republic that “passions are and ought only to be the servants of reason, to reverse Hume’s formulation,” so that philosophers are kings. But Plato does not say that philosophers are kings, or that passions are the servants of reason, but that they should be. Much of the Republic is a description of states or cities in which there is no rule by reason. The fact that we are actually ruled often by something non-rational does not show that Hume is right and Plato is wrong.

Haidt is also wrong about Kant. Hume’s victory over Kant is repeatedly trumpeted. But what is the operative picture of Kant here? He was “rather low on empathizing,” though not as low as Bentham, who probably had Asperger’s syndrome. And what’s the evidence for this? Haidt suggests that Kant provided an abstract rule, the Categorical Imperative, which is based in logic, and in particular in the law of non-contradiction. But Haidt does not seem to know the formula of the end-in-itself. According to this formulation of the Categorical Imperative, we have to share as far as possible the ends of all those we affect by our actions, and we have to make those ends our own ends. This requires us, Kant says, to sympathize. Haidt is trading in caricature.

Haidt’s view is that we should not think of God as giving us a command to universal morality, because there is no rational moral compass that could receive such a command, and no “inner scientist” trying to find the truth about how to live. Haidt has three kinds of evidence for the hypothesis that the intuitive dog wags the rational tail. The evidence comes from what he calls “dumbfounding” and “post hoc fabrication,” from psychopathy, and from the bias towards the self that is pervasive in moral justification.

To obtain the first kind of evidence Haidt tells his subjects stories that involve what he calls “harmless taboo violations,” and that he contrasts with “harm-based” stories like the one Kohlberg used to tell his subjects about Hans stealing a drug to save his wife. Here’s an example of a “harmless taboo violation”: a lab worker, a vegetarian, eats some human flesh (from a cadaver that was to be burned). Subjects presented with this vignette experienced a predictable flash of disgust. Only 13% said that what the person did was all right. But when asked to say what was wrong with what she did, the subjects seemed at a loss. Haidt says they seemed to flail around, throwing out reason after reason, and rarely changing their minds when it was shown their latest reason wasn’t relevant. People were making a moral judgment immediately and emotionally. Reasoning was merely the servant of the passions, and when the servant failed to find any good arguments, the master did not change his mind.

But even without an altogether clearly articulated vision of the good, we can still have such a vision that can shape the lives we try to lead. Suppose that what used to be pervasive in society was a justification of the prohibition of cannibalism or incest in terms of divine command: that these were against the order that God had established. But suppose this kind of justification has become less socially prevalent. We would expect people to become less articulate in their discursive reasoning. Dumbfounding may well be culturally relative, so that cultures that stress what Haidt calls “the ethic of divinity” are not dumbfounded by just the same stories. But from this cultural relativity it wouldn’t follow that the intuitions of people in those cultures were not tracking something actually bad, or that they didn’t have a conscience or rational moral compass whose job it is to do this tracking.

The data are important, because they show that we are less good at explicit discursive reasoning than we tend to think we are. But the data do not establish the conclusion that Haidt wants, namely, that the “rider’s job is to serve the elephant, not to act as a moral compass.” Again, we have here the slip between the descriptive and the normative.

Haidt uses the example of psychopathy to argue there’s no rational will or conscience whose job it is to act as moral compass. But how could this conclusion be established from the data of psychopathy? Even if there’s a genetic base for it, nothing follow about whether people without this condition have a faculty of reason that can guide them in more than strategic planning. Haidt has reduced reason to what Aristotle calls “cleverness,” which works out the means to any end presented. Aristotle says both practically wise and villainous people are called clever. But the evidence of our failures of practical wisdom does not show that we do not have the faculties that would make such wisdom possible, only that we do not exercise them reliably.

The third kind of evidence Haidt uses is from the bias towards the self that is pervasive in moral justification. He tries to show that reason is not fit to rule; it was designed to seek justification, not truth. What his data show, however, is something else, something he says in the very next sentence: People care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality. There’s a key difference between these claims. The second is perfectly consistent with, and indeed supports, the Kantian view that we start off under the propensity to evil that overrides the equally innate but essential human predisposition to good. But the first denies this view, because it denies Kant’s account of the predisposition, which is that we are the sorts of creature who respond with a certain kind of feeling. Inside we often act more like a lawyer justifying ourselves than a scientist seeking the truth. Likewise when brain scans are performed on partisans when they hear about hypocrisy among their favored candidates. “The data came out strongly supporting Hume,” with emotional and intuitive processes running the show and only putting in a call to reasoning when its services are needed to justify a desired conclusion.

But, Hare responds, the fact that we pay attention to and delight disproportionately in thinking about what suits our own inclinations does not show that when we do so we are thinking properly, or that our reason is doing its “job.” Rather, it shows that we are not doing our job as rational animals at all well.

Hare concludes this subsection by saying a divine command theorist should take cognizance of the evidence of all three types (dumbfounding and psychopathy and bias), and should be chastened by it because of what it shows about our lack of intellectual virtue and some people’s lack of conscience altogether. But this should not make her abandon her theory. What she holds possible and what she holds obligatory depend on her theological premises, and what she thinks in particular about the three arguments presented in the first chapter. Evidence about our various forms of cognitive failure does not show that we do not have the ability to screen our initial inputs given the available assistance, or that universal morality is not an appropriate screen. If this is right, then this evidence does not show us that “parochial altruism is the most we can accomplish.”

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.3.1: The First Defense: Epicurean

3.3: Four Attempted Defenses of Eudaemonism. The rest of this chapter considers four defenses of eudaemonism, and rejects them all. The first is an Epicurean defense, the second a Stoic defense, the third a Thomist defense, and the last a defense through the notion of self-transcendence.

3.3.1 The First Defense: Epicurean. The first defense of eudaemonism against the charge that it is unacceptably self-regarding derives from the Epicurean tradition, which identifies the good with pleasure. There’s an important division within the hedonist tradition between what Sidgwick calls “egoistic hedonism” and “universalistic hedonism.” The egoistic hedonist proposes that the agent should think about her own pleasures, and the universalistic hedonist proposes that she should think about the pleasures of all those affected by her decision, and count those people as worth the same as herself in the calculation of all sentient beings.

Both kinds of hedonist have in common that it is pleasures the agent should think about, and that these pleasures constitute happiness. As friendship is so vital, some hedonists might suggest the wise will feel the same way about their friends as they do about themselves. The friendship marked by equal regard for the friend may develop gradually, and it may sometimes involve something like a pact or agreement to love one’s friends as much as oneself. But the basic point is the first one, that pleasure as our chief good should be expanded to include the pleasure we get from the pleasure of our friends. With some kinds of pleasure such as pleasure in friendship, pursuing something for its own sake and for its particular kind of pleasure amount to the same thing, and with these pleasures we can give a plausible account of a good life that includes concern for the good of others for its own sake.

Note that this first eudaemonist defense doesn’t have to be put in terms of pleasure. Some utilitarians moved from an emphasis on pleasure to an emphasis on happiness, because there seemed to be ingredients of happiness that are not in any obvious way pleasures, and they thought we should be maximizing those ingredients as well. Some utilitarians moved beyond the value-laden notion of happiness to an account in terms of maximization of preferences.

The essential form of the first eudaemonist defense is that an agent’s own good, whether this is defined in terms of pleasure, happiness, or preference-satisfaction, can be structured in a complex way, so that it contains both merely one-at-a-time goods and life-as-a-whole-affirming goods; the former can be evaluated by their contribution to the latter. Some goods, like friendship, have leverage over one’s life, making it worthwhile as a whole. The point of this first defense is that objectors to eudaemonism focus on the merely one-at-a-time goods, and fail to see the resources of the life-as-a-whole-affirming goods for addressing the objection that eudaemonism is unacceptably self-regarding. Not all of these latter have to be pleasures.

We can put the point in terms of Scotus’s distinction between the three different kinds of thing we want in loving God: wanting God to have everything good, wanting union with God, and wanting the satisfaction that comes from union with God. The first eudaemonist defense does not need to rely only on the third kind, but can work with the second kind as well. If, however, it moves to the first kind, it will no longer be eudaemonist.

The strategy in this first eudaemonist defense is to distinguish two different ways in which we can enjoy something “for its own sake.” In one way, if something is loved for its own sake, there can’t be anything at all for the sake of which it is loved. The analogy with music is helpful here. It’s wrongheaded to criticize one who says he loves music for its own sake because in fact he derives pleasure from music. When I get the proper kind of pleasure from music, the pleasure is not something else, or something external, for the sake of which I love the music. The second way we can enjoy something “for its own sake” is when there is nothing external to it for the sake of which it is loved. Pleasures come in two different kinds, as do ingredients of happiness and preference-satisfaction. There are what was called earlier “one-at-a-time” goods and “life-as-a-whole-affirming” goods. When I love my friend for her own sake, this is like loving music for itself; both of these loves are perfectly compatible with, indeed they require, getting a certain kind of pleasure or satisfaction, and loving that satisfaction. The two loves also have the capacity to have leverage over one’s life as a whole. Life-as-a-whole-affirming goods characteristically have instances such that the instance is loved both for its own sake and for the sake of the life-as-a-whole-affirming good, which belongs with it internally. The first eudaemonist defense argues that in loving my friend for her own sake I am also loving her for the sake of my happiness, and there is nothing paradoxical in this because her well-being is internal to, or an ingredient in, my own.

We can appeal here to two different levels at which we do practical thinking. We operate most of the time at an intuitive level with principles that we do not think out from scratch. But when we have leisure, we can try to work out critically what principles or intuitions we should live by. We could call this higher level “the critical level.” This strategy works for the first eudaemonist defense because we can say that the self-referential eudaemonism comes into play only at the critical level. Most of the time we live at the intuitive level, and at this level we can think entirely about the well-being of our friends or of other people. Some object to this two-level thinking as schizophrenic, but Hare thinks this is unfair. The two-level account, he says, is not supposed to be an account of two simultaneous pieces of reflection. There’s nothing schizophrenic about parents thinking sometimes about the benefits to the world as a whole of parents feeling special obligations to their own children.

There is, however, something troublesome about the application of the two-level picture to a defense of eudaemonism, rather than to an analysis of morality more broadly. The question is how much concern for others the higher or critical level will let through. Suppose we concede that it will endorse principles at the intuitive level that call for loving family and friends for their own sake. The problem is that the critical level is still by hypothesis eudaemonist, and, when I consider the interests of others beyond family and friends, it will not make all that much room for them. We have a limited capacity for caring. Even if the eudaemonist critical level endorses principles of non-self-indexed concern for family and friends at the intuitive level, this will itself diminish the caring we can do for those outside these limits.

Suppose we grant that the satisfaction we get from seeing the happiness of those we love is capable of exerting significant leverage on whether our lives seem to us worthwhile on the whole. Nonetheless there are needs of people and indeed of all sentient beings beyond these limits that we both can and should try to meet. We seem to reach natural limits of human caring, and we almost certainly have moral obligations that go beyond these limits. If the eudaemonist responds that my sense of a meaningful life is not what counts, but rather the degree of my perfection, we have gone beyond the limits of the Epicurean defense.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.2.3: Two Errors of Kant:

Eudaemonism is a single-source view. Before looking at four defenses of it, we need to face two difficulties with Kant’s account of morality and happiness. Fortunately we can modify Kant’s own account in order to overcome these difficulties without losing the argument from providence, and the modification will remove some distractions.

The first difficulty is with Kant’s account of happiness, and the second with his account of morality. Both problems come from Kant’s overstrict dichotomies. Happiness, he says, is “a rational being’s consciousness of the agreeableness of life uninterruptibly accompanying his whole existence,” and he goes on to say that “to make this the supreme ground for the determination of choice constitutes the principle of self-love.” Kant here ties happiness to pleasure, pleasure that derives from the satisfaction of one’s inclinations as a sum. In turn, inclinations are defined in terms of the lower faculty of desire, and their satisfaction is something empirical, and can’t therefore determine practical (necessary) laws. To try to make happiness the ground of morality would therefore be to lose morality altogether.

Despite first appearances, though, Kant is against what he calls a “morose” ethics, which sets morality in opposition to all pleasure and renounces all concern of moral persons for their own happiness. He distinguishes, it’s true, between what he calls “practical love” (the will’s obedience to the moral law) and “pathological love” (which is a feeling such as sympathy and compassion), and denies that the latter can be commanded, whereas the former is “the kernel of all laws.” This might lead one to think that the state that the moral law commands is one in which inclinations do not appear at all. But in fact Kant says that to love God with practical love (which can be commanded) means to do God’s commandments gladly, and that to love one’s neighbors means to practice all duties toward them gladly. He has in mind a translation of the theological doctrine of sanctification, in which our inclinations become over time more and more in line with duty. In the resultant state, our wills will be in conformity to duty for its own sake, and this deserves what Kant calls “esteem,” and our inclinations will also conform to what duty requires, and this deserves what he calls “praise and encouragement.” But merely including inclinations in this way is not enough.

There are two revisions we need to make to Kant’s account of happiness. The first is that Kant needs to acknowledge a kind of “gladness” that is not merely the satisfaction of sensuous inclination. He needs an account of not-purely-sensuous moral pleasures, such as the awe we feel in the presence of the moral law within, or a delight in goodness that is like the astonishment at the wisdom displayed in the order of nature, an effect “stimulated only by reason.” [Think of the pleasure that comes from reading great books.] But this kind of “higher” pleasure is never properly integrated into Kant’s account. The second revision is that it is better not to insist on tying happiness to pleasure at all, even if we continue to index the content of happiness to the agent. There are many self-indexed goods, such as accomplishment, which are only derivatively pleasures. That is to say, we get pleasure from them only because we antecedently think of them as good.

The difficulty with Kant’s account of morality is that he holds that motivation is either by self-indexed inclination or by universal moral principle. This dichotomy is a mistake, and it is interesting that Scotus makes very much the same mistake. After elaborating the distinction between the two affections, Scotus proceeds to argue that every motivation that is for justice rather than advantage is for God, and so the choice is always: God or self. But surely I can be motivated to achieve something for, say, Peter, without this being self-indexed by my caring essentially that Peter is in some special relation to me or that the result be achieved by me. My motivation here is indeed indexed to a particular and I may not be motivated to pursue similar good things for other similar people. On Scotus’s dichotomy, this motivation does not belong under either the affection for justice or the affection for advantage.

In the same way Kant holds that the first formula of the Categorical Imperative, the formula of universal law, requires the eliminability not only of self-reference, but reference to any particular person. But we need an intermediate category, of inclinations that are not universal but that are indexed not to the self but some other individual. This is not only a terminological question, whether to call a principle “moral” if it contains ineliminable reference to, say, Peter. There is a substantive question about whether to have the highest kind of admiration (what Kant calls “esteem”) for a person who acts on such a principle. Hare thinks we should, and will argue so in a later chapter. One way to put this point is that the two formulations of the Categorical Imperative can come apart on one plausible interpretation of the second (though not on Kant’s interpretation of it). It is possible to care for another person as an end in herself but not be willing to eliminate reference to her from the maxim of one’s action.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.2.2: A Double-Source View: Scotus:

A contrasting view is a double-source view of motivation. Duns Scotus accepts from Anselm that there are two basic affections of the will, what Anselm calls “the affection for advantage,” and the “affection for justice.” The affection for advantage is an inclination towards our own happiness and perfection. The affection for justice is directed towards what is good in itself, regardless of its relation to us. Aristotle’s account of motivation has nothing corresponding to the affection for justice; we do everything that we do for the sake of our own happiness, even if we do not represent this to ourselves as such. Since, for Scotus, we have both affections, we face the question of how to rank them. He is not proposing that there is anything wrong with the affection for advantage. Even in heaven, we will have both affections. The affection for advantage is only wrong when it is ranked improperly. The affection for justice moderates the affection for advantage.

We can show how these can come apart counterfactually. If God were to require us, which fortunately God does not, to sacrifice even our own salvation for the sake of God’s glory, then we should be willing to do so. Hare says this thought requires a certain view about God’s election: God is not required by necessity to elect all human beings for salvation. [I’m skeptical those two concepts are connected in the way Hare pushes.]It’s a view common to Aquinas and Calvin that God not only can but does elect some for union with God (predestination), and some for separation (reprobation). [Like Hare said earlier, nearly every claim about Aquinas can be questioned.] But all that is needed for the thought experiment is that God can, not that God does. Such radical obedience repeats a pattern of thought that can be found in Moses, who says that he is willing to be blotted out of the book of life, and Paul, who says that he is willing to become a curse. Jesus too accepts separation from his Father as the price for saving his people, which was the declared motivation of both Moses and Paul. [Unclear the separation between Jesus and his Father was ontological.]

Scotus distinguishes three kinds of love we can have for God: love for God independently of any relation to us, love of union with God, and love of the satisfaction we get from that union. Lucifer started from the second of these, which is indeed something good in itself though self-indexed, and came to love it inordinately as his own advantage. We humans are now born with this wrongful ranking of the affection for advantage, and it can be reversed only by God’s assistance.

Scotus draws a connection between the two affections and freedom of the will. It is interesting Aristotle held neither a doctrine of the affection for justice in Scotus’s sense nor a doctrine of freedom of the will (though Hare admits this claim is open to doubt, as Anthony Kenny, for example, would dispute it). Scotus reports Anselm’s thought experiment of an angel who has the affection for advantage but not the affection for justice. The angel couldn’t be held accountable. It’s the affection for justice that’s needed for the liberty innate to the will.

Scotus says that neither of the affections is the rule for the other, but it’s the divine will that’s the superior rule that binds the affection for justice to moderate the affection for advantage. On the other hand, the moral goodness of the act consists mainly in its conformity with right reason, which dictates fully just how all the circumstances should be that surround the act. By “right reason” he means to include our right reason, and it is tempting to conclude from this and similar passages that Scotus is saying divine command is not necessary for the moral goodness of an act, and that therefore Scotus is not a divine command theorist at all. But remember the distinction between value and obligation. Goodness is possessed by anything that takes us to our end [notice Hare’s operative conception of goodness there; I’d put that point differently], but God has discretion over which route to this end, and so which good things to require. Only what God commands has the authority of obligation.

A second distinction is between our knowledge of moral goodness or obligation and our knowledge of what makes them good or obligatory. It’s possible that what makes something good or obligatory is some relation to God (different in the two cases), but that we can know by right reason that the thing is good or obligatory without knowing this relation. On some version of the doctrine of general revelation, God can reveal that some route to our end is required of us without our knowing that it is God who requires it.

A third distinction is between harmony or fittingness with nature and implication from nature. If God does command what fits our end, we can expect to see a harmony between this route and our end (or our nature in the sense of our end). We can expect to be able to tell a story about how, for example, we tend to flourish when we honor our parents, and refrain from murder, adultery, theft, lying, and coveting. But Scotus insists that what we see here is a harmony, or a beauty, or a fittingness, and not an implication from our nature. When we put these three distinctions together, it is plausible to say that he thinks it is God’s command that makes something morally obligatory.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.2.1: A Single-Source View: Aristotle

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Section 3.2 is called “The Sources of Motivation.” In the introduction to this section, Hare writes that to explain the term “self-indexed” we need to go back in the history of the topic; first to Aristotle, then to Scotus. Aristotle gives a single-source account of motivation, Scotus a double-source account.

3.2.1 Aristotle wrote that the good has been aptly described as that at which everything aims. Action and rational choice are related in the same way as art and discipline: in other words, rational choice controls action. So there’s a similarity between these two pairs of terms, but also a contrast: for some ends are activities and others are products apart from these. This distinction structures the whole discussion. Both art and action have ends, but art has an end that is a product apart from the activity of the art itself, whereas the end of action is not separate from the activity in this way.

Action has as its end happiness, and happiness is activity in accordance with characteristic virtue (or excellence) and therefore perfects the agent. Various virtues all are dispositions to act or feel or think as reason prescribes, so the end of action is itself doing something or being active in a way that manifests these dispositions. We can describe the status of the action or activity in terms of how noble it is or how close it is to the divine. The good for the polis is more noble and divine than the good for an individual.

Aristotle acknowledges that, even though the good is agreed to have the name “happiness,” there are different accounts of what happiness consists in. He himself mentions three, and he’s probably reflecting the Pythagorean picture of the three lives, which came to him through Plato. Pythagoras distinguished three kinds of people who go to the Olympic Games: the athletes, who go to compete; the businessman, who go to make money; and the spectators, who go to watch. By analogy, in Aristotle’s account there is the life of somatic pleasure, the life of politics, and the life of contemplation. All three of these candidates are activities of the agent. Pleasure, on this account, is an activity or at least accompanies activity, political life is constant activity, and contemplation (which has the noblest and most divine objects) is the activity of our highest part.

Two reasons might be proposed for disputing this reading of Aristotle. Someone might say that we act virtuously in order to attain what is noble, and the term “noble” involves no essential reference to the agent. And someone might say that Aristotle ends up stretching the identity of the agent to include his family and friends and fellow-citizens. These two reasons converge, since Aristotle thinks it’s noble to care for one’s friends for their own sake, and not for one’s own. But to test whether we genuinely escape essential reference to the agent in good that’s pursued by the agent, we need to look at cases where there’s tension between the good of others and the agent’s own good, and see how Aristotle adjudicates those cases. One example: does nobility require death in battle for the sake of the polis? Here Aristotle feels he has to give a justification in terms of the brave man’s reward either by posthumous honor or by the brief moment of exaltation before being killed. Neither of these justifications takes us beyond essential reference to the agent.

The case of friendship is even clearer. Aristotle uses the language of “a different himself” to talk first about a father’s relation to his son, and then a virtuous friend’s relation to his friend. The father loves the son as “a different himself” because the son came from him, and the virtuous friend loves his friend as “another himself” because he related to the friend and to himself in the same way. So the happiness of a good person will require the happiness of his family and friends. But he will aim at their happiness only to the extent that they have these special relations with him. Aristotle is not proposing here that we value every human being as an end-in-itself or that our own happiness counts morally no more or no less than anyone else’s. If we are noble, we will have concern for the other for the sake of the other, but this concern is conditional on the maintenance of the special relation. This limitation is made vivid when Aristotle considers the question whether we wish our friends to become gods. Aristotle thinks not, for they would then no longer wish our friendship, so we want the greatest good for them “as human beings.” He adds the additional qualification that we do not strictly want the greatest good for our friends because “it is himself most of all that each person wishes what is good.” He insists that virtue doesn’t leave the sphere of self-love.

Two distinctions need to be made here. The first is often associated with Bishop Butler. There are two senses in which every good aimed at by an agent might be a good for the agent, and the first does not imply the second. The first sense is that the good aimed at is good for the agent just because the agent aims at it. In this sense, the good aimed at might not itself contain any relation to the agent beyond that of being aimed at by means available to the agent. In the second sense, the good for the agent is an object whose definition includes internal reference to the agent, as in Aristotle’s example of “the good of my friend.” It’s a mistake to think the second follows from the first.

The other distinction is implicit in the description of the first. We should not insist that the good for the agent (in the second sense) be articulated as such by the agent. We can internalize various principles without being able to articulate them; even without articulation, though, they can shape the lives we try to lead.

Summing up, we can say that Aristotle gives us a single-source view of the motivation of an agent; the source is the agent’s happiness, understood as a perfecting activity of the agent. This is good “for the agent” in the second of the two senses distinguished by Butler. The object pursued has essential reference to the agent, not merely because it is what she is pursuing, but in its own definition. The self-indexed good does not, however, require that the agent articulate it as self-indexed. The claim of the present chapter is that a single-source view of the motivation of an agent is a mistake, but that Aristotle is right nonetheless to say that we start from self-preference. This is not because we are human, however, but because of a disorder of our wills. It’s not necessary for humans to prefer themselves in this way.

Good God Panel Discussion with Baggett, Walls, Copan, and Craig

At the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Dr. Baggett and Dr. Walls were invited to participate in a panel discussion of their book Good God with Paul Copan and William Lane Craig offering some critique and feedback on their work. Baggett and Walls provide a concise summary of the book, which is a cumulative and abductive moral argument for theism, while Copan and Craig offer insightful analysis. If you are interested in better understanding the moral argument in general or its abductive version in particular, this discussion will be well worth your time.

In Part 1, moderator Mark Foreman introduces the panelists and explains the context of the book. David Baggett provides a summary of their moral argument. Paul Copan offers what he thinks are the major highlights, a response to John Hare's criticisms, as well as some criticisms of his own.

In Part 2, Jerry Walls explains why it was necessary to address Calvinism in their moral argument. In Part 3, William Lane Craig responds to the critique of the deductive moral argument in Good God. And David Baggett responds to Craig by offering a defense of the abductive moral argument in Part 4.

In Part 5, the panelists (Baggett, Craig, Copan, and Walls) field questions about the effectiveness of abduction, the consistency of the abductive moral argument, and a few more on the subject of Calvinism.

Response to Chapter 15 of Russ Shafer-Landau’s book Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? “Does Ethical Objectivity Require God?” Part II

Shafer-Landau (subsequently SL) starts this chapter by saying that most people “think that if moral rules are objective, then they must have been authored by God.” He notes that this includes theists, many of whom believe in God precisely because they believe in ethical objectivity, and see no way of defending that idea without God. It also includes those atheistic moral skeptics who think skepticism can only be escaped via God, whom they reject.

I’m not sure if SL is right in suggesting that most theists believe in God because they believe in ethical objectivity. The suggestion seems to be that the essential insight of the moral argument plays a central role in the theistic convictions of most believers. Although I find myself fond of this notion, whether or not it’s true is an empirical question to which I don’t know the answer. I imagine that lots of people would adduce lots of different reasons for their religious convictions—from religious experience to other arguments for taking God seriously. Some, no doubt, though, would cite distinctively moral reasons as the best evidence of their religious views, and as a moral apologist I think they’re generally on solid ground in doing so.

The fact that there’s also that group of atheists who embrace moral skepticism shows that they, too, accept roughly half of the moral argument for God’s existence. Of course such arguments come in lots of varieties, and it’s something of a misnomer to refer to the moral argument, as I’ve acknowledged elsewhere before. But for present purposes, for the sake of convenience, I’m subsuming them all under a general penumbral phrase as “the moral argument.” Generally such an argument identifies some moral phenomena and then proceeds to argue that it somehow points to God—abductively, inductively, deductively, or in some less discursive fashion. SL’s point about atheists who are moral skeptics exactly because they’re atheists shows that such people are inclined to think that objective morals would indeed point to God, find their locus in God (or however we might put it), and as a result, absent God, we lose our reason to believe in objective morality.

Notice with respect to this group of moral skeptics they don’t consider themselves rationally justified to believe in objective ethics, but they would accept the other half of the moral argument: that morality is a sign of God. Since they have already rejected the conclusion of God, they become skeptical of the moral premise. As mentioned in Part I, though, I think atheists clearly have excellent reasons to take moral objectivity seriously, reasons and evidence that should be taken seriously. If such thinkers were to stop indulging their moral skepticism and accept the evidence for moral objectivity that seems so obvious, they would actually have the tools to construct the moral argument: Morality is real, it points to God, so morality provides reasons to believe that God exists. (Obviously, this is just a rudimentary sketch of the logic here.) But alas, as SL points out, though such skeptics agree that objective morality would provide evidence for God’s existence, perhaps it’s their very concern about the direction morality is taking them which leads to their embrace of moral skepticism instead. (Of course, some of them might simply have taken, say, naturalism as obvious or even axiomatic for what they consider independent reasons, and then see objective morality with its distinctive features as incongruous with such a picture. But what follows will be a response to the first type of atheists.)

SL expresses such reasoning in the form of the “argument from atheism”: Ethics is objective only if God exists. But God does not exist. Therefore ethics isn’t objective.

One small observation at this juncture: what leaves me skeptical of this argument, among other things, is that it’s predicated on God’s nonexistence, which leaves me wondering why someone would feel confident using this as an obvious piece of evidence. The matter of God’s existence is a notoriously challenging philosophical question, with plenty of very smart people on both sides of the question. The problem of evil is often cited as evidence against God’s existence, and sometimes the problem of divine hiddenness. But on the other side, all manner of arguments have been generated—teleological, moral, cosmological, historical. One can brush all such arguments beside in derision, but this question is far from a no-brainer. If someone is sincerely convinced God doesn’t exist, for various reasons, that’s fine, but the obviousness of objective morality shines no less brightly as a result. And if these folks are skeptical of morality just because of their atheism, yet can see that morality, if real, would point to God, one is left to wonder if the evidence for their atheism is nearly as strong as the evidence for moral objectivity. Even the problem of evil can’t get off the ground without substantive moral claims, so what is the reason for their atheism? Presumably they think objective morality generally points toward God, not away, so the problem of evil isn’t likely to be the main reason for their atheism. So what nonmoral reason would they cite?

Perhaps they use the problem of evil despite their moral skepticism by suggesting that theists believe in such moral objectivity, so they are susceptible to the problem of evil after all. But this still seems strange to me, because they are also of the view that objective morality, all things considered, is consistent with theism but inconsistent with atheism. So even if the problem of evil provides some evidence against theism, a full-fledged analysis of the range of objective moral phenomena (of which evil in the world is just one aspect) provides a case for God, not against God. At any rate, believers are within their rights, if the problem of evil is raised on their terms, to use the full panoply of resources at their disposal to provide a hope for its ultimate resolution.

Well, back to SL’s response to the argument from atheism. He defers discussion of God’s existence to another occasion, and then zeroes in on the other premise by suggesting that “we don’t have to settle whether God exists in order to decide on the merits of ethical objectivism.” That much is true, if the point is an epistemic one. We needn’t know whether or not God exists to consider ourselves, and properly so, eminently justified, warranted, and rational to be moral objectivists. In fact, the moral argument for God assumes exactly this. But then SL writes, “Ethical objectivism can be true even if God doesn’t exist.” If by “can” he means merely epistemic possibility, then the claim amounts to saying, “For all we know, ethical objectivism may be true even if God doesn’t exist.” That claim may be right, though it’s fairly innocuous and unambitious. Truth be told, though, he’s probably making a more substantive claim like this: “It’s metaphysically possible that ethical objectivity obtain even if God doesn’t exist.” Even if that were true, it wouldn’t undermine the moral argument for God’s existence, at least in some of its versions. In an abductive version, for example, God is argued to be the best explanation of objective morality, which is in principle consistent with there being another, less good explanation of moral phenomena.

But is the stronger claim true? That’s a hard question, an exceedingly hard question. Here’s an easier one: what’s the evidence for the claim he adduces? That we don’t have to settle whether God exists in order to decide on the merits of ethical objectivism. But as I’ve said, I think that’s entirely right. The evidence for objective morality stands on its own, which is what makes it such an effective premise in a moral argument for God. But in no way does it thus follow that “ethical objectivism can be true even if God doesn’t exist,” which is a strong metaphysical claim that goes well beyond the less ambitious and appropriate epistemic point. Perhaps he’s right in his more ambitious assertion, but up to this point we’ve been given no reason to think he is. In the next post we’ll start delving into his case in more detail.

Summary of Chapter 7, God and Cosmos: “Moral Transformation”

In this chapter, Baggett and Walls discuss the performative aspect of morality, what John Hare calls the moral gap. They argue that theism possesses the necessary resources for moral transformation. Secular theories however do not have such resources and either reduce the moral demand, artificially exaggerate human capacities, or settle for substitutes for Divine assistance.

C. S. Lewis painted a picture of the moral enterprise. He envisioned a fleet of ships, where each individual ship must be seaworthy, the ships must avoid running into each other, and they need a destination. Likewise, morality has these three aspects: (1) individual moral flourishing, (2) harmonious interpersonal interaction, and (3) all of us striving toward a moral destination.

Although morality celebrates every step in the right direction, it seems to impose a demand for more. Telling lesser unjustified lies is an improvement over telling whoppers, but it’s not enough to satisfy the demands of morality. Morality calls us towards the goal of moral perfection. So the real question is what can secularists say about moral transformation? How do they close the moral gap (the gap between our best efforts to live a moral life and the moral demand itself)? Note that a full-fledged moral account has to address matters of character and virtue, not just moral behaviors. Morality pertains not only to what we do, but to who we are. Note that their view is not that secularists are morally weak or deficient. Neither is their claim that religious belief is necessary to be a moral person. Rather, if the secular worldview is true, then there is a moral gap.

Immanuel Kant was one of those who recognized this gap. The first aspect of Kantian moral faith is the conviction that the moral life is possible. On Kant's view, our natural capacities are not up to the task, yet the moral demand is constantly there. Without adequate resources to meet the moral demand, a moral gap is inevitable. If morality requires of us what we cannot do, however, then we may complain based on the principle that "ought implies can." If we cannot live up to the moral standard, then it is not the case that we ought to. The standard cannot be authoritative if it's impossible to meet. However, there is another possibility. If there are resources to help us meet the moral demand, then there may be a duty to use these resources. So the principle can be modified to "ought implies can with the help available." If naturalism does not have such resources, however, then it seems that secular theories fall short of explaining the authority of morality.

First, a secular theory may try to close the gap by exaggerating human capacities. Hare takes utilitarian Shelly Kagan as a contemporary example. It seems obvious that our own interests have the most motivational force for us. As Hare says, "We are prone to give more weight to our own interests, just because they are ours, than the utilitarian principle allows." Kagan makes a counterfactual claim that "if one's beliefs were vivid, then one would tend to conform to the impartial standpoint."

Baggett and Walls first reply that if it is the case we ought to do something, then it must be the case that we can do it, not just in the counterfactual sense of "I could do it if I wanted to," but we must be able to want to. Second, they reference Hare who argues the counterfactual is false. There are two ways to understand vividness. Vividness might capture the degree of clarity and distinctness regarding a belief, or it might pertain instead to the degree of importance we attach to a belief. Kagan means to use vividness in the former sense. In reply, then, we can look at cases where we can be very clear about someone's pleasure without caring much about it. Consider misanthropic people who are either indifferent to the interests of others or enjoy causing them distress. Another example is when the love of power, envy, fear, and resentment are operative in families, even where awareness of the needs of others is great. Also, there's willful blindness such as choosing not to be vividly aware of a need such as famine relief.  Greater clarity of the pleasure and pain of others does not necessarily result in an increased tendency towards partiality. Even if it did, it may not lead to an overall tendency towards partiality. Impartiality requires no bias at all. Hence complete impartiality is beyond the natural capacity, and cultivating vividness is insufficient to close the gap.

Second, a secular theory may instead try to reduce the moral demand in order to close the gap. Baggett and Walls examine some feminist views. The first strategy suggests that women are better suited to meet the moral demand than men are. Feminist Carol Gilligan argued that women are more caring, less competitive, less abstract, and more sensitive than men in making moral decisions. Her claims, however, are controversial and many studies on gender difference in solving moral dilemmas show otherwise. Empathy is a human trait found in both genders. Hence this view is implausible.

The second strategy reduces the moral demand by rejecting the universalist and impartiality constraints in Kantian and utilitarian ethics. Instead one should adopt the views put forth by various care ethicists. Gilligan, for example, says that moral judgments must be specific, but the universalist requires them to be general. Hare replies by distinguishing between the general and specific, on the one hand, and between the universal and particular, on the other. A principle can be universal and yet completely specific in detail. Kant's universal does not imply being general and non-specific.

Contra Kant, Hare further argues that some moral judgments are not universalizable. He calls these particular moral judgments. For example, if a mother is torn between caring for her daughter and helping in a worthy cause, she may be within her moral rights to care for her daughter, even if she cannot show that doing so is morally preferable. She is caring for her daughter and doing so for her daughter's own sake, whether or not everything about it can be universalized. Hare thinks such an example does not lower the moral demand. What would, however, lower the demand is feminist Nell Noddings' sort of extreme particularism. Noddings insists that she bears no responsibility to feed starving children in Africa because duties only arise in the close context of caring. Hence, it seems troubling to reduce the moral demand.

Finally, one may try to find a secular substitute for God's assistance. Baggett and Walls choose to review Hare's discussion of David Gauthier's social contract theory. Gauthier argues that it is rational to agree to be moral, and also to refrain from being a "free rider." (A free rider is one who does not follow the rules of morality and yet gets the benefits of social cooperation.) Gauthier thinks that we are all self-interested and argues that we need to cooperate because there are goods we cannot obtain without doing so. Morality is a set of prescriptions for such participation. Morality in time can then take on value for us.

Hare thinks that such an account fails. Morality simply does not present itself to us as justifying itself first instrumentally, as a means for the production of cooperative goods, and then we end up caring for justice. Following Kant, Hare thinks that practical reason does not start from maximizing self-interest, and then choosing to bring others into affective ties, and finally end up valuing justice for its own sake. Rather, practical reason starts from recognizing the self and others as under the law. Hare also lists many other difficulties with such a view.

Going back to the moral gap, there are some challenges related to it. It is common to ask "Why be moral?" A good answer is that morality is its own reward. But as Linda Zagzebski points out, the question of "should I try to be moral?" arises. It doesn't make sense to attempt to do something one cannot possibly do. What is the point of someone trying to become a great artist if he lacks the talent and cannot achieve it? Knowing that it is worthwhile is not sufficient to provide rational motivation if the chances of success are too remote. Zagzebski further identifies three ways in which we need moral confidence. First, we need confidence that we can have moral knowledge. Second, we need confidence in our moral efficacy, both in the sense that we can overcome moral weakness, and in the sense that we have the causal power to bring about good in the world. Third, we need confidence in the moral knowledge and moral efficacy of other people, since moral goals require cooperation. Moral despair cannot be rational. Hence, we must be able to rely on more than our own human powers and those of others in attempting to lead a moral life—God. This is the basis for Zagzebski’s moral argument.

One might try to avoid moral despair by embracing David Hume's form of skepticism. His skepticism over causation, induction, an enduring self, etc., had no practical implications. When Hume said that various beliefs were not rationally justified or rationally grounded, his subsequent counsel was not that we abandon such beliefs or stop such practices. Is this an option? Baggett and Walls argue that this possibility obtains only if certain Humean strictures are satisfied. One of those features is that the beliefs and practices in question are impracticable to give up. Moral beliefs and practices, however, do not qualify, since they can be abandoned and in certain circles surely are. Hence, appealing to Hume's form of skepticism does not work to evade the force of Zagzebski’s moral argument.

Response to Chapter 15 of Russ Shafer-Landau’s book Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? “Does Ethical Objectivity Require God?” Part I

Russ Shafer-Landau is a leading metaethicist today, and the book in which this particular chapter is included is a popular treatment of the question of moral objectivity. In dealing with this book, I don’t pretend I have addressed everything he’s written (in his other work) on this specific question of God and ethics, and I also readily concede that the treatment he gives these issues here is more cursory than he treats them in other places.

All in good time; philosophy is slow. On another occasion I can discuss those other works. Here I will consider just this one chapter in this particular book, a book that’s full of good sense on a wide variety of subjects. Much of the time I find myself entirely agreeing with his analysis in the book, which is tremendously useful and admirably well expressed. The content of this particular chapter, though, while clear, is far less persuasive to me, for reasons I’ll outline below. I thought it might be worthwhile to explicate the reasons why.

The title of this chapter reveals a clue as to how Shafer-Landau (subsequently SL) intends to conduct the discussion: does ethical objectivity require God? Language of requirement here is interesting to note. From a descriptive viewpoint, it’s surely not the case that all atheists are skeptical of ethical objectivity, so that’s one obvious sense in which ethical objectivity doesn’t require God—though, of course, what’s shown by this descriptive analysis is merely that belief in ethical objectivity doesn’t require belief in God. Beliefs may or may not be rational, warranted, justified, and the like, however, so this isn’t much of a substantive claim yet.

A more revealing question is whether belief can be rational that there is moral objectivity without believing in God. I suspect the answer to that question is yes, even though I myself am a theistic ethicist and, in fact, a moral apologist. But this is because my case is that God (not mere belief in God) is the best explanation of various moral phenomena (including a robust sense of moral objectivity), not necessarily the only explanation, and that, given certain background assumptions and other convictions, folks are well within their epistemic rights, as atheists, to believe in moral objectivity. Of course, the fact that my argument doesn’t require God to be the only ultimate explanation of morality doesn’t preclude my believing that he is, but the point that needs special emphasis at the moment is this one: the moral argument for God’s existence assumes that there are plenty of unbelievers who have solid reasons for taking moral objectivity seriously.

If indeed God exists and even does serve at the foundation of morality, it makes all the more sense that even unbelievers would have epistemic access to moral truth—on the assumption that a piece of evidence for a divine reality is objective morality itself. An argument for God’s existence needs to feature evidence that appears at least as likely as God’s existence, preferably even more so. Otherwise the argument is trying in vain to persuade one to accept a conclusion on the basis of evidence that seems even less likely. I wholeheartedly affirm that unbelievers can know, just as well as theists can, that there are objective moral standards of rightness and wrongness, good and evil. (Obviously, in speaking of morality here, the reference is to objective moral truths, not merely conventional and contingent moral beliefs and practices that may or may not comport with objective morality.)

The question “Does Ethical Objectivity Require God?” can be understood epistemically or ontologically. Epistemologically, I’ve already argued that rational belief in ethical objectivity doesn’t require God. If the order of being is different from the order of knowing, however, this isn’t enough to show that morality is independent of God metaphysically. The ontological or metaphysical question is the more penetrating question: does moral truth require God as its foundation? Admittedly this is a question that’s not easy to answer; making a case either for or against such an idea takes quite a bit of time and effort. If SL doesn’t want to pursue this particular question in this chapter, that’s entirely fine and his prerogative, but it will be useful as we go along to look to see if his claims broach moral metaphysics or are confined to moral epistemology. If the former happens (and it surely does), I intend to subject what he says to critical scrutiny.

Now that we’re done assessing the title of the chapter, we can proceed.

Moral Objectivity & Universality

Moral Objectivity & Universality Is moral universality necessary to show moral objectivity? Is it sufficient?

Before we can answer those questions, we have to explain what we mean by these words. Moral objectivity contrasts with moral subjectivity, which relativizes moral truth to individuals, cultures, or subcultures. Moral objectivity is the contrasting (indeed, contradictory) idea that that some moral truths apply to everyone irrespective of their preferences, wishes, beliefs, etc.

Moral universality features an important ambiguity. It might mean, first, (a moral claim) believed by everyone. Or it might mean, second, (a moral claim) applicable to or authoritative for everyone. This is a crucial distinction to draw. Let’s call the first sense of universality Ub, and the second Ua.

Is moral universality necessary for moral objectivity? This is the same question as asking if the following conditional is true: If moral objectivity obtains, is morality universal? But then we have to ask this for both senses of moral universality. Let “MO” stand for “moral objectivity.”

The questions, symbolically expressed, then look like this:

(1) Is “MO --> Ub” true? an

(2) Is “MO --> Ua” true?

First, consider (1). If Ub is necessary for MO, then MO would be sufficient to show Ub. But it isn’t. The fact that something is an objective moral truth isn’t enough to imply that everyone believes it. So the answer to (1) is no.

What about (2)? Is Ua necessary for MO? It would seem so. If something is an objective moral truth, it’s applicable to everyone (capable of understanding it, at least). Moral objectivity is sufficient to show universality in this sense, and (equivalently) Ua is logically necessary for MO.

Now let’s go the other way and ask if universality is sufficient for moral objectivity. Again, we have to disambiguate between the two kinds of universality, so there are two questions here:

(3) Is “Ub --> MO” true? and

(4) Is “Ua --> MO” true?

In terms of (3), the mere fact that some moral claim is universally believed is not enough to show that it’s an objective moral truth. Everyone might turn out to be wrong, after all, perhaps systematically deluded. So the answer to (3) is no. But suppose we consider it in the form of an argument:

(5) Ub

(6) So, MO

This is not an entailment, for the same reason it’s false to claim that Ub implies MO. Nevertheless, as a less-than-deductive inference, it’s not necessarily bad. The universality (or near universality) of a moral belief can, in certain cases, provide reasons to think the belief in question is an objective moral truth. We see an analogous example or parity in reasoning in, say, science, when we take widespread agreement on a matter to have for its best explanation its convergence on an objective truth. Still, though, nothing like an entailment relation obtains, obviously enough.

What about (4)? Does universal moral applicability imply moral objectivity? It would plausibly seem so. If a moral truth applies authoritatively to everyone, that’s practically the definition of an objective, morally binding truth. (4) is true.

If this is right, then Ub is neither necessary nor sufficient for moral objectivity, although universality or near universality of belief may (if certain conditions are met) provide some evidence for an objective moral truth.

But Ua is both necessary and sufficient for moral objectivity. This would mean that universality, in this sense, obtains just in case moral objectivity obtains.

Another way of putting that last claim is that universality—in the sense of universal authority or applicability—is true if and only if moral objectivity is true. In other words, both of these claims are true: Ua is true if moral objectivity is true, and Ua is true only if moral objectivity is true.

Represented symbolically, they would look like this, respectively:

MO --> Ua, and Ua --> MO.

Such universality, along with moral objectivity, mutually imply one another, which can be expressed with a biconditional like this:

Ua <----> MO.

C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Part Three: The Moral Argument (Outline)

Editor's note: Choo has provided a helpful outline of the chapter on C.S. Lewis' moral argument by David Baggett and Erik Wielenberg. If you are interested in the full chapter, you can find the book information here.

Mailbag: The Science of Morality?

Question Hello professor, I hope you are doing well. I have been looking at some of your work and I think you could answer a question I have in regards to ethics. If you have time that is. If you don't have the time you can just ignore my email. My question has to do with an article I have been reading recently that is titled the science of morality. In the article the author states that morally good is identical with flourishing well being and the morally bad is identical with misery. I read some reviews of the articles and other scholars state that the author was just redefining moral goodness with well being and argument was circular. But why believe that objective goodness cannot be identical with flourishing of human well being? What makes the argument invalid?

Thank you for your time,

Bill

Answer

Hi Bill,

This is a deceptively hard question! The topic of goodness is quite complicated. Usually when we say that someone is morally good, we're talking about traits of character and various virtues the person shows. Somehow the goodness inheres in the person. We speak secondarily of various states of affairs being good, but it's almost a misnomer to call a state of affairs morally good. This is why Kant was of the view that the only truly good thing is a good will--an attribute of a person.

We might come across an awful state of affairs, but what's morally bad is, most likely, the person or persons (if there is such a person or are such persons) culpably responsible for bringing it about. To say a hurricane is bad is not to say it's morally bad. It just is what it is. Calling it morally bad is anthropomorphism. Of course it's nonmorally bad, in that it produces, potentially, a range of undesirable consequences, but you asked about moral goodness in particular. Often when goodness gets contrasted with bad, the focus is on nonmoral considerations that pertain to things like pleasure and pain; but when good gets contrasted with evil, the distinctively moral features come into view.

So flourishing is a perfect example of something that's nonmorally good. But it doesn't get us to the heart of moral goodness. The effort to define moral goodness by appeal to human flourishing is a rookie mistake. It's a deflationary attempt by folks who want to domesticate the concept to reduce moral goodness to something other than itself. It's thus an attempt to define moral goodness in terms that aren't moral at all. But moral goodness can't be reduced or explained away in such a manner. The effort falls prey to the naturalistic fallacy, for one thing. For another, it just leaves too much out.

Suppose you are asked a question and risk being shot to tell the right answer. The morally good thing to do, you're convinced, is to tell the truth. But still, you tell the truth and immediately get shot. How on earth can an appeal to human flourishing be adequate to account for the moral goodness of your choice in such a situation? Rather than conducing to survival and flourishing, it ensured your immediate death.

Now, just because there's not an analytic reduction of "moral goodness" into "human flourishing" doesn't mean there's no connection between them. To the contrary, I think there's an airtight (synthetic) connection between the two, but that's quite different from saying moral goodness just is human flourishing. Ultimately, on a Christian worldview, moral goodness comes about by way of right relation with and transformation by God entirely into the image of Christ--a righteous and holy life--and with such a life will come complete fulfillment and satisfaction. But that doesn't mean morality and happiness are the same thing; they're not. But a good God can and will ensure their ultimate correspondence.

Best,

djb

Wielenberg on Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

[Excerpt from a larger essay--my side of a printed debate on God and morality with Louise Antony--forthcoming in a new edition of Michael Peterson and Ray VanArragon, eds., Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell). --MDL]

As a part of a larger project of defending an atheistic accounting of “robust ethics,” Erik Wielenberg has recently taken on such arguments and suggested a model for reconciling an evolutionary account of morality with his view that morality is objective (even “robust”).  One assumption of my argument so far has been that unless there is a direct connection between the reproductive advantage of our moral beliefs and their truth--so that their being true is responsible for their being fitness conferring--then we’ve no reason to assume their truth.  But as Nagel says, “value realism” is like an unattached spinning wheel.  It does no such explanatory work, and so we are left merely with the view that we have the moral beliefs we do because of their reproductive advantage--they have been fobbed off on us by our genes, as Ruse says.  Wielenberg instead posits an indirect connection that is routed through a “third factor”[1]-- a set of evolved human cognitive faculties (e.g., reason).  It is plausible that certain cognitive faculties have evolved because they confer fitness upon their possessors.  Further, there is “wide agreement” that “if rights exist at all, their presence is guaranteed by certain cognitive faculties.”[2]  Suppose, then, that there are rights and that such rights are based upon those cognitive faculties.  It will follow that any creature with such cognitive faculties possesses rights, and any such creature who exercises those faculties to believe There are rights believes truly.  This, of course, is because having the cognitive faculties is both necessary for having the belief and sufficient for having the rights. 

In this way, the relevant cognitive faculties are responsible for both moral rights and beliefs about those rights, and so the cognitive faculties explain the correlation between moral rights and beliefs about those rights.[3]

This is a neat way of explaining how evolution might ultimately be responsible for our having true moral beliefs, even if those beliefs are about non-natural truths.  Does it succeed?
            Wielenberg is entitled to the assumption of rights due to the rhetorical context of his argument.  After all, I and others have argued that there would not be moral knowledge even if there were moral truths, and so his strategy--positing some moral truth and determining whether it could be known given the conditions laid down--is the natural way to proceed.  And his proposed model is, so far as I can tell, internally consistent.  After all, if our cognitive faculties are a product of our evolution, and if having such faculties is sufficient for having rights, then anyone capable of believing that there are rights is in possession of both the faculties and the rights. 

But one wonders whether the assumption is safely lifted from the paper and transferred to the world itself.  Indeed, there are two assumptions at work: there are rights, and rights are based upon the possession of certain cognitive faculties.  Wielenberg cites “wide agreement” regarding the connection between those faculties and the possession of rights.  But the entrenched evolutionary skeptic might suggest that our belief in rights is just a part of that fobbed-off illusion.  When Bertrand Russell appealed to “wide agreement” regarding certain moral beliefs, George Santayana replied--no doubt with Darwin in mind--that such appeals are little better than “the inevitable and hygienic bias of one race of animals.”[4]  Further, given the background assumption of evolutionary naturalism, we might expect that such faculties themselves emerged as an evolutionary solution to the problem of survival and reproduction.  As such, they are of instrumental value as a means to such ends, much like opposable thumbs.  Can we rest the case for the intrinsic value of persons upon their possession of extrinsically valuable properties?  Human rationality is certainly good for humans just as arboreal acrobatic skills are good for rhesus monkeys, but beyond bald assumptions, does Wielenberg’s view provide the conceptual resources for thinking that it is a good in itself as would seem to be required for it to do the work assigned to it?

            Wielenberg’s strategy may go some distance towards reducing the improbability of our possessing moral knowledge given the emergence of rational and moral agents who have both rights and a tendency to believe that they do.  But the model in itself fails to address a more astonishing cosmic coincidence to which Santayana pointed in his critique of Russell.  As an atheist and naturalist, Russell famously said, “Man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving.”[5]   The forces of nature are not goal-oriented, and we should not think of the emergence of homo sapiens as the achievement of cosmic purposes.  We are here because nature “in her secular hurryings”[6] happened in at least one corner of the universe to throw spinning matter into the right recipe for things such as ourselves to form. But at the same time, Russell defended a view of morality that includes objective and intrinsic values--a form of Platonism not far from Wielenberg’s robust ethics. Santayana argued that these two commitments are mutually at odds.  As he saw, Russell’s moral philosophy implied that “In the realm of essences, before anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable property, that they ought to exist, or at least, that, if anything exists, it ought to conform to them.”[7]  But Russell’s naturalism--and rejection of cosmic purpose--implies, “What exists…is deaf to this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason.”[8]   It would be marvelous indeed if, in the accidental world that Russell described, the very things that ought to exist should have come to be.  It would be as though among the eternal verities a special premium had forever been placed upon, say, conscious moral agents, and, despite the countless possibilities, and because of sheer dumb luck, the same had been fashioned and formed of Big Bang debris.  Presumably, Beings with cognitive faculties have rights is a necessary truth--if a truth at all--and, as such, it was inscribed in the Platonic empyrean long before the Big Bang.  How astonishing it seems that such things with that “remarkable property” of being such that they ought to exist--should have appeared at all when the things responsible for their emergence had no prevision of such an end.  Did we win the cosmic lottery?  Santayana observed that at least Plato had an explanation for such things because the Good that he conceived was a “power,” influencing the world of people and things so that the course that nature has in fact taken is determined at least in part by moral values.[9] It is for such reasons that Thomas Nagel has posited the idea that “value is not just an accidental side effect of life; rather, there is life because life is a necessary condition of value.”[10]  Nagel’s good is a power, unlike Russell’s, and as such it plays a role in explaining the moral shape that the world has taken.  But presumably no such moral guidance was at work in Wielenberg’s universe, seeing to it that portions of the material world should be fashioned and formed into moral agents.  Yet here we are!
            I think this point remains despite Wielenberg’s further ruminations on whether Darwinian Counterfactuals are, in fact, likely or even possible.  He suggests that if physical law does not strictly require that emergent moral agents should have developed moral sensibilities something like our own, so that evolution would naturally narrow the range of possible outcomes, it is highly likely--at least “for all we know.”  Daniel Dennett has suggested that there may be certain “forced moves” in evolutionary design space.  For instance, given locomotion, stereoscopic vision is predictable.[11]  Wielenberg seems to be suggesting a forced move of his own.  But both moves are forced--if at all--only once certain conditions are in place.  Nagel has a relevant observation here on precisely the example Dennett cites.

Once conscious organisms appear on the scene, we can see how it would go. For Example … certain structures necessarily have visual experience, in a sense that inextricably combines phenomenology and capacities for discrimination in the control of action, and that there are no possible structures capable of the same control without the phenomenology. If such structures appeared on the evolutionary menu, they would presumably enhance the fitness of the resulting organisms.... But that would not explain why such structures formed in the first place.[12]

Even if we think it likely that the evolution of moral agents such as ourselves should drop into a predictable groove, we are still left to explain why the natural world should be deeply structured in such a way that its natural processes and algorithms should produce such agents at all.  The whole thing is quite wonderful, and without the guidance of God, a Platonic demiurge, or Nagel’s guiding values, it seems an astonishing bit of luck.  It adds an additional epicycle of coincidence to the so-called “anthropic coincidences” in that not only have we beat astonishing odds simply by arriving on the scene--because of the mind-boggling improbability that the universe should have permitted and sustained life of any kind--but that it is also the achievement of ends eternally declared to be good and morally desirable by necessarily true but causally impotent moral standards. It is a called shot, but without a Babe Ruth to place it.  To base one’s argument on an assumption that defies such odds seems a bit like planning one’s retirement on the assumption that one will win the lottery.  One might suggest that Wielenberg help himself to the additional unjustified assumption of Nagel’s causally effective guiding values, for this would fill a void in his view, and anyone with the liberality to grant the one (i.e., rights) is likely to grant the other.

[1] To illustrate, suppose we notice a strong--even exceptionless--correlation between chilly weather and the turning of fall leaves.  But suppose we are told that the chill in the air is not the cause of the colorful leaves.  But then we consider a third factor--the earth’s tilt from the sun resulting in both less light and colder weather--which is responsible for both the color (due to the light) and the chill.

[2] Wielenberg, p. 145.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., p. 274.

[5] Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 107.

[6] Ibid., p. 108.

[7] George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine and Platonism and the Spiritual Life (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), p. 153.

[8] Ibid., p. 153.

[9] “Plato attributes a single vital direction and a single narrow source to the cosmos. This is what determines and narrows the source of the true good; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not have been a dogmatic moralist had he not been a theist.” Santayana, Winds of Doctrine, p. 143.

[10] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Consciousness, p. 116.

[11] Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

[12] Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 60. 

Image: "Darwin" by I. Dolphin. CC License. 

John Hare’s God’s Command, 7.1 “Maimonides”

In Chapter 7, Hare explores the tensions between divine command theory and Jewish thinkers. Hare suggests that though there are important differences between the Abrahamic faiths, they nevertheless all “wrestle with the question of how divine command relates to human nature.”

In the first of three sections, Hare concerns himself with the thought of Maimonides, especially as he has been interpreted by Marvin Fox. One of the difficulties with understanding Maimonides is due to the esoteric nature of his work. On the surface, it seems that Maimonides presents and affirms many contradictory positions. Maimonides’ approach can sometimes obfuscate or confuse his meaning, so the first step to understanding his insights about the connection between natural law and divine command will be to determine how to interpret his The Guide for the Perplexed.

Hare considers three different hermeneutical approaches. The first approach comes from Leo Strauss. Strauss suggests that the seeming contradictions can be untangled by taking whatever position is least frequently mentioned as Maimonides’ actual view. But Hare thinks this approach is not well supported and leads to some awkward interpretations. Second, Fox argues that Maimonides wants his readers to hold the opposing views at the same time, but that these views are not actually contradictions. Fox thinks that this strategy is didactic; it is meant to ease the reader into deeper and deeper truths about God. Hare, however, thinks that such a practice will leave Maimonides’ thought forever in a fog and is uncharitable; therefore, Hare thinks we should adopt a third way. Hare thinks we should Maimonides as presenting opposing statements as only appearing to be contradictory and the right set of qualifications and context will dissolve the tension.

With a principled method for interpreting Maimonides in hand, Hare applies it Maimonides’ doctrine of the mean and account of the virtues. Hare takes Fox and his interpretation of Maimonides as a foil as he provides his own account. Fox thinks of Maimonides’ understanding of the virtues as deeply influenced by Aristotle. Even though Maimonides and Aristotle disagree, they both have a “doctrine of the mean.” Fox tries to show that Aristotle’s account of the virtues was established by appeal to nature. Supposedly, Aristotle determined what the virtues were and their character by grounding them in facts about human nature.

Hare thinks Fox’s analysis of Aristotle goes wrong in two ways. First, the doctrine of the mean does not only seek to find the balance between human activities, like courage being between foolhardiness and cowardice. Often, virtue is correlated with a “peak” which might vary depending on context instead of a balance. The best number of calories to eat, for example, will depend on the activity and physiology of a particular person. There is no set number of calories that is exactly in the middle of two extremes which all people should eat. Secondly, Hare says that Aristotle never makes the connection between nature and the specific character of the virtues. Aristotle does, broadly, ground happiness in human nature and its proper function. But his specific characterization of proper function is primarily influenced by his own tradition, especially as it comes from Homer. Thus, Aristotle does not ground the specific requirements of the moral life in facts about nature and, therefore, Fox’s understanding of the disagreement between Maimonides and Aristotle is mistaken.

Hare thinks there are two fundamental differences between Aristotle and Maimonides. First, Maimonides is conscious of his use of sources outside his own tradition and argues for their legitimacy. This is important because it helps to demonstrate that Maimonides recognizes the cognitive value of philosophy in thinking about ethics. Aristotle, on the other hand, has his own sources but they come from within his tradition and he offers no argument for their use. The second difference has to do with the sources internal to their tradition. Aristotle says that God does not give commands, but that he serves the role of grounding what reason can determine. Maimonides, on the other hand, thinks God has given commands and that these commands have ontological and epistemic priority, but they can be shown to be consistent with proper human reason and nature. However, moral obligations are only obligatory because they are command by God. Man can see often that they are good, but their rightness supervenes on the divine command.

Hare’s final aim in his discussion of Maimonides is to correct the idea that he was a moral non-cognitivist. One motivation for the non-cognitivist view comes from Maimonides’ comments on the effects of the Fall. Prior to the Fall, Maimonides say that Adam could make “true judgments” and afterwards, he could only make judgments about what is “beautiful or ugly.” Fox argues, on the assumption that aesthetic judgments are non-cognitive, plus Maimonides’ relative pessimism about human ability to discern the moral law, that this makes Maimonides a non-cognitivist.

Hare disagrees for two reasons. First, he thinks it is anachronistic to apply the label to Maimonides. Second, he argues that it is simply not true that aesthetic judgments are non-cognitive. But then what did Maimonides mean in his comments about the Fall? Hare suggests that possibly Maimonides was merely indicating that human epistemic capacity is limited by the effects of the Fall. Maimonides intends for the move from truth to beauty to be a deterioration and Hare thinks that this deterioration has to do with man’s capacity to discern rightly objective truths. Without the proper relation to God, man can only judge from his perspective. These judgments will be based on convention and be provisional. However, God in his revelation of himself in the Torah, makes accommodation to man’s position while also providing them with moral truth. An example of this accommodation and restoration is the animal sacrifices. The moral truth is that God should be worshiped, but God accommodates this truth to man by allowing them to continue their “natural” practice of worship through sacrifice, but only when it is directed to him.

In this section, Hare wants to emphasize that Maimonides did not think that morality and reason are totally isolated; they are complementary. But this does not mean that the moral law can be discovered by reason, even if it can be shown to be rational after it is revealed.

Image: "Maimonides" By Unknown - Psychiatric News, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26202333

Moral Arguments for Theistic Belief

By Robert Adams Robert Adams is the author of multiple books, including Finite and Infinite Goods.  More than one person has credited Adams with resurrecting Divine Command Theory among philosophers of religion. 

Chapter 6, God and Cosmos, “Moral Knowledge” (Epistemic)

To start off this chapter, Baggett and Walls give a set of scenarios. Suppose you look at a clock tower at 2 o'clock and form the belief that it is 2 o'clock. The first scenario is the discursive knowledge case. The clock is accurate and fully functional in this case. Given this, one seems to have justification and (inferential) knowledge. The second scenario is the nondiscursive knowledge scenario. While the clock is accurate and fully functional, one does not infer the time from such factors. Rather, having glanced at the clock, you simply find yourself believing it's 2 o'clock. Or you intuitively know the time accurately without even looking at the clock (though this seems farfetched for us in the actual world). The point here is that this is something more intuitive and perhaps even properly basic, which counts as knowledge.

The third case is a Gettier case. Suppose that the clock broke 24 hours before. It is just a coincidence that you look at the clock at 2 o'clock. Here Baggett and Walls distinguish between objective justification and subjective justification. Objectively speaking, one lacks justification because one is relying on a defective clock. However, one has subjective justification because one has no reason to suspect that the clock is broken and has good reason to believe that it is 2 o'clock. However, one presumably lacks knowledge in this case. The last scenario is the random time scenario. Suppose that the clock was never made to give accurate times, but instead its hands are guided by a random set of electronic signals. So the clock gives the time it does because of causes which are completely disconnected from the actual time. Suppose it gives the time 7:15 when you know well that it is early afternoon. Here there is no knowledge and no justification to think that the time indicated is accurate.

While some may think that naturalism rules out moral knowledge, it does not mean that naturalists lack moral knowledge. For them (and everyone else) to lack moral knowledge, it must be that naturalism rules out moral knowledge and that naturalism is true. However, Baggett and Walls want to maintain that naturalists have moral knowledge.

They start by discussing discursive moral knowledge. Consider three categories of people. The first have argued that on naturalism, both morality and logic lose their validity. Some examples are C. S. Lewis, Victor Reppert and Alvin Plantinga.

The second, such as J. L. Mackie, Richard Joyce, E. O. Wilson, and Michael Ruse, argue that on naturalism, theoretical reasoning retains its power and validity, but normative moral categories are lost.

The last category of people think that reason (and logic) is reliable, and so we should think that morality should be thought of as reliable too. Such are moral realists like Derek Parfit, Erik Wielenberg, David Brink, and David Enoch.

For example, they may say that we are committed to the existence of other norms of reasoning with the same ontological and epistemological properties as moral ones. Angus Ritchie (a theist) argues that there are true statements which (1) are both descriptive of entities and are also prescriptive to those rational agents who come to know their truth, and (2) they are neither analytic nor knowable by empirical research alone. Ritchie identifies norms of theory choice in the physical sciences. Some call these epistemic norms. Ritchie uses inference to the best explanation (IBE) as an example. Physicists routinely make such inferences. The principle is both descriptive and normative, for it tells us what we ought to accept on the basis of evidence generated by empirical observation and experimentation.

Hence based on IBEs, we are committed to the existence of synthetic a priori imperatives. David Enoch takes another approach by arguing that human beings can't help but engage in explanatory projects in order to make sense of the world. Since the practice of explanation is indispensable, and principles of IBE are indispensable to that practice, we have to take their deliverances seriously. Ritchie further conjoins this with the practice of reflective equilibrium where we take singular intuitively compelling judgments and systematize them into general rules.

Next Baggett and Walls discuss nondiscursive moral knowledge. Psychologists distinguish between the "adaptive unconscious," whose operations are fast, automatic, and effortless, and the operations of the conscious mind, which are slow and require work. The former is known as System 1 and the latter as System 2. Some knowledge is nondiscursive. Some, like Plantinga, have argued that certain beliefs are rational, justified, and warranted without being evidentially supported by other propositions because they are properly basic. Baggett and Walls suggest that it is reasonable to think that certain foundational, axiomatic moral convictions might qualify as properly basic beliefs.

Baggett and Walls next discuss moral Gettier cases. Angus Menuge says that the shared claimed of variants of evolutionary ethics (EE) is that the moral sense of human beings is the result of their natural history, which is contingent and could have been different. He makes a distinction where weak EE says that it is only our moral psychology (our moral beliefs) that would be different if we had evolved differently, while strong EE says that moral ontology itself (what actually is right or wrong) would be different if we evolved differently.

Strong EE's main problem is that it makes human rights contingent. It cannot account for moral values and obligations well. Furthermore, Menuge points out that if rights are based on our natural capacities, then some individuals who suffer physical or mental defects do not have rights. Another point is that natural selection may explain what is good for an organism, in that certain characteristics can increase the likelihood of survival and reproduction. Yet the fact that X is good for Y does not imply that X is morally good.

Weak EE on the other hand gives us no grounds for thinking that we could know moral reality. On weak EE, it seems that one is right just by mere coincidence, since our epistemic moral faculties are not properly connected to moral truth. Erik Wielenberg replies that it is a mistake to assume that humans could have evolved with radically different moral principles from the ones we actually possess. While he admits some luck is involved, he does not think it is significant since the same luck afflicts many of our nonmoral beliefs also.

Baggett and Walls now discuss the challenge to justified moral beliefs. If moral beliefs are not dependent on the relevant moral truth-makers, then a tracking relation has not been established to show that our moral judgments essentially depend on actual moral truth. Gilbert Harman, for example, says that if moral beliefs can be given an evolutionary explanation, then they can be explained without appealing to their truth, and thus moral beliefs lack justification. Many others such as Guy Kahane, Michael Ruse, Richard Joyce, Sharon Street, and Mark Linville have advanced similar evolutionary debunking arguments.

Street, for example, assumes that our moral beliefs are fitness-aimed but asks if they are also truth-aimed. If there is no fitness-truth relation, then we should be skeptical about morality. If there is a fitness-truth relation, then it is either that moral beliefs have reproductive fitness because they are true (the tracking relation) or simply because of the fitness they have conferred (the adaptive link account). The adaptive link account leads to constructivism. The moral realist needs a tracking account but this seems implausible. A tracking account of paternal instincts, for example, has to say that such instincts were favored not just because such behavior preserved DNA, but also because it is independently true that parents ought to care for their offspring. Richard Joyce thinks similarly, yet thinks that there is wisdom in a fictionalist approach to ethics, acting as if there are binding moral truths for the purpose of social harmony.

How do secularists respond to the challenge? Baggett and Walls first consider replies by secular naturalists who take moral properties to be natural properties. They examine the Cornell realist account advanced by Boyd, Brink, and Sturgeon. Sturgeon replies to Harman by saying that moral facts are explanatorily relevant. Sturgeon thinks that moral facts are commonly and plausibly thought to have explanatory relevance since many moral explanations appear to be good explanations. Consider the case of Hitler. Harman thinks that we should not think that, over and above such natural facts about Hitler as his anti-semitism and will to power, there is a moral fact of Hitler's depravity. Sturgeon follows Kripke in suggesting that moral terms rigidly designate natural properties, so moral terms pick out natural properties and track them. Justice, for example, picks out some properties such as equity displayed in the distribution of societal goods. This, however, seems to embrace weak EE which seems saddled with an intractable epistemic challenge.

Baggett and Walls then consider instead secular accounts which take moral properties to be non-natural properties (which supervene on natural properties). Neither David Enoch nor Erik Wielenberg provides a tracking account and, and both concede that our moral judgments are not likely directly caused by the relevant moral truths. Instead, they endorse a "third factor" explanation. If we can explain why (1) x causes y, and (2) x entails z, then we have explained why y and z go together.

For example, on one view in philosophy of mind, brain state B causes action A, and B entails mental state M (M supervenes on B), therefore we can explain why M and A go together. Enoch says that this is a (Godless) pre-established-harmony type of explanation. Enoch's solution assumes that survival or reproductive success is at least somewhat good generally. Next he says that evolutionary selective forces have shaped our normative judgments and beliefs with the aim of survival or reproductive success. So the fact that survival is good pre-establishes the harmony between the normative truths and our normative beliefs. While Baggett and Walls think that Enoch's approach has potential, they point out that other worldviews can also affirm the value of human beings and their survival, and arguably better.

Wielenberg's approach is similar but identifies a different third factor. His third factor is certain cognitive faculties. He says that relevant cognitive faculties entail the presence of moral rights and generate beliefs about such rights. How do those faculties entail moral rights? Briefly, he thinks that in light of our cognitive faculties that recognize overriding normative reasons to act, rights are thereby entailed. The primary reservation Baggett and Walls have regarding Wielenberg's account is ontological. They think his account does not do justice to the authority of morality, and does not satisfactory explain the existence of binding moral obligations and human rights.

To support the claim that theism better explains our moral knowledge than secular accounts, Baggett and Walls look to Ritchie. In From Morality to Metaphysics: The Theistic Implications of our Ethical Commitments, Ritchie advances a moral argument for God by accomplishing three central tasks. First he presses the distinction between justification and explanation of moral truths. Second, he engages secular accounts that address moral cognition. Lastly, he defends the theistic alternative. Ritchie asks three questions about the genesis and justification of our cognitive capacities. (1) What is the justification for our faith in their reliability? (2) What is the historical explanation for their development? (3) What is the explanation for their capacity for tracking truth? Ritchie grants the naturalist moral justification and even moral knowledge, but argues that naturalism fails to explain the truth-tracking ability of our moral cognition. He thinks that natural selection can tell a story of how humans come to have truth-tracking capacities for theoretical reasoning, namely, that we will survive better if we hold true beliefs that derive from theoretical reasoning. However, he denies that such correlation is nearly so plausible in the moral case. He thinks that a value system based on survival, replication, and pleasure alone is inadequate. He thinks that there needs to be a wider teleological explanation, one that ultimately involves the intentions of God.

In summary, Baggett and Walls think that (assuming moral realism) moral knowledge is possible. Naturalism faces some challenges from those who Gettierize or challenge naturalists on the issue of moral justification. Instead of arguing that naturalism cannot account for moral knowledge, Baggett and Walls grants moral knowledge but thinks that theism provides a better explanation of our knowledge than naturalism. While they admit that third factor solutions seem to have potential, such solutions are entirely consistent with theism, and in Enoch’s case theism seems to feature better resources to deploy such a solution. So in agreement with Ritchie, they conclude that even if moral knowledge is consistent with naturalism, a better explanation is a theistic one.

Chapter 5 of God and Cosmos, “Moral Obligations.” Part 2

Baggett and Walls next evaluate the Cornell realist account, advanced by those like David Brink, Nicholas Sturgeon, and Richard Boyd. Cornell realists view moral facts as natural facts (constituted by some complex collection of natural properties), but not reducible to non-moral natural facts. Some natural properties, for example, contribute to human flourishing. Baggett and Walls point out that even if Cornell realist accounts of the good are successful, this does not provide an effective account of moral obligations. C. Stephen Evans, for example, thinks such a theory of goodness is fully compatible with Divine Command Theory.

They then further evaluate Brink’s approach to accounting for moral obligations, which seems far from a Kantian understanding of moral obligations as categorical. Kant's categorical imperatives fell on hard times for various reasons. One reason was due to potentially competing or conflicting moral demands which Kant provided no way of resolving. W. D. Ross extended Kant’s work by distinguishing between prima facie and ultima facie duties (ultima facie duties are one’s duties all things considered). This however loosened the perceived authority of certain moral obligations since they can be overridden. Another reason was due to the action-guiding nature of morality. Moral anti-realists took this as evidence to suggest that moral judgments can't merely purport to state facts, otherwise they cannot fulfill their practical function. Those who resist this assessment typically affirm an internalist thesis, where there is an internal or conceptual connection between moral considerations and action or the sources of action. One can be an internalist about motives or reasons. And “reasons for action” may refer to explanatory reasons or justifying ones. Brink responds to the anti-realist challenge by identifying three distinguishable characteristics of internalism: (1) Moral considerations necessarily motivate or provide reason for action; (2) it follows that the claim about the motivational power or rationality of morality must be a priori; (3) it follows that the rationality or motivational power of moral considerations cannot depend on substantive considerations such as what the content of morality turns out to be, facts about agents, or the content of the correct theory of rationality. On motivation internalism, anyone who recognizes a moral fact will necessarily be motivated to act on it. This seems implausible. On reason internalism, anyone who recognizes a moral fact has a reason to act on it. Baggett and Walls think this is true, but resists Brink’s insistence that internalism entails (2) and (3). Brink himself admits that not all internalists embrace all three conditions.

Brink rejects reason internalism because he thinks that someone can correctly identify their moral obligations and yet still wonder whether those obligations give him good reason for action. Hence not all moral facts are reason-giving. While he thinks moral obligations apply to agents independently of their desires, he thinks that moral obligations do not provide reasons for action independently of their desires. The sort of reasons he is interested in are the sorts of pro-attitudes that expressivists and prescriptivists affirm are constitutive of moral judgments. Baggett and Walls reject Brink’s account, then, because this waters down the concept of moral obligations. The sort of reasons that moral obligations give us to act are connected with the authority of morality, which is closely connected to a commitment to reason internalism. Certain moral facts themselves provide distinctive, and sometimes overriding reasons for acting, bringing deliberation to a halt and resulting in a guilty verdict if we do not perform the duties in question. Hence, Brink’s account cannot explain these kind of moral obligations and instead waters the concept down. Baggett and Walls then look at non-natural normative realism advanced by those like Derek Parfit and Erik Wielenberg. On this view, moral facts are non-natural facts. Wielenberg claims that the secularist can posit that moral laws are normative in nature just like the laws of logic are. Both sets of laws are prescriptive. Since the law of non-contradiction can exist without a lawgiver, so can morality. Baggett and Walls however think that there are important dissimilarities. First, it may well be that all genuine norms have their locus in God, reflecting aspects of his nature. Second, only violation of the moral law properly generates guilt, a need to be forgiven, and alienation from others that forgiveness can fix. Making a logical mistake may cause us to feel silly or embarrassed, but not guilty.

Baggett and Walls also note that some secular philosophers lose the distinctive character of moral obligations when they assimilate moral obligations to having good reasons to act a certain way. What they do is provide a number of reasons to perform an action and act as though they have explained where a moral obligation comes from. Instead, Baggett and Walls claim that it often works the other way. Because we have a moral obligation gives us reasons to act. For example, we don't look at a poor person and count up a distinct set of normative reasons to act and then infer we have an obligation as a result. We instead apprehend or feel the force or sense the authority of the obligation to help, which gives us overriding reasons to act.

Chapter 5 of God and Cosmos, “Moral Obligations.” (Part 1)

In this chapter, Baggett and Walls focus on deontic moral concepts, which include moral permissibility, moral obligation, and moral forbiddenness. Such are also expressed as moral duties (right/wrong). First, they point out that moral obligations are not identical to feelings of obligation. The feelings of obligation are neither necessary nor sufficient for moral obligations. One might have a moral obligation to do X without feeling so. One could also feel obligated to do X without actually having a moral obligation to do X. Hence explaining one's feeling of moral obligations is not sufficient to explain moral obligations themselves.

Baggett and Walls start by visiting a few ways of understanding the nature of moral obligations. Scott M. James lists these truths about moral judgments: (1) Moral creatures understand prohibitions; (2) moral prohibitions appear independent of human desires and (3) human conventions; (4) moral judgments are tightly linked to motivation; (5) moral judgments imply notions of dessert (punishment is justified); (6) moral creatures experience a distinctive affective response to our own wrongdoing, and this response often prompts us to make amends for the wrongdoing.

Robert Adams identifies two features responsible for guilt. The first is based on the harm caused to, and the second is alienation from, people. He regards obligations as a species of social requirement, and guilt consists in alienation from those who have required of us what we did not do. Adams of course does not think that every social bond results in obligations, only a morally good one. How good the demand is, who the demander is, and the consequences of the demand all plays a role.

C. Stephen Evans similarly lists four features of moral obligations: (1) A judgment about a moral obligation is a kind of verdict on my action; (2) a moral obligation brings reflection to closure; (3) a moral obligation involves accountability or responsibility; and (4) a moral obligation holds for persons simply as persons.

In sum, moral duties are not mere suggestions, or merely prescriptions there are excellent reasons to fulfill. Moral obligations possess authority (which gives us decisive reasons for action) and are inescapable (applying to persons with few exceptions). Moral laws are what we must do, not in the sense of the causal must (like the physical laws), but of the moral must. Violating moral duties also results in an experience of guilt (rather than shame or degradation).

Now Baggett and Walls move to various accounts that attempt to explain moral obligations. First is the functionalist approach advanced by primatologist Frans de Waal. De Waal argues that social primates have tendencies to prosociality, altruistic behaviors, community concern, and aversion to inequality. He thinks that the weight of morality comes not from above but from inside of us. So he thinks that morality has its origin in evolutionary history. What distinguishes human morality from the prosociality, altruism, and empathy with other primates is our capacity as humans to reflect about such things.

The problem is that when it comes to accounting for moral obligations, de Waal either (1) eschews their importance, by arguing that moral feelings provide better moral reasons to act than do obligations; or (2) does not explain moral obligations at all, but merely our feelings or sense of moral obligations. Regarding the first strategy, while he may be right to say that moral motivation should come from higher moral impulses (as most virtue theorists would agree), he still needs to explain the existence of moral obligations themselves. The second strategy also does nothing to provide an explanation of moral obligations themselves, only a feeling of obligation.

What he calls "morality" isn't moral truths; rather, they are moral beliefs, feelings, and practices at most. He has fallaciously conflated feeling obligated with being obligated. Even moral skeptics can affirm what he has said. In fact many moral skeptics argue that since naturalistic evolution can explain why we have moral beliefs, without any reference to their truth, there is no reason to affirm moral realism. Furthermore, others like E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse have argued based on a naturalistic evolutionary account that if humans had evolved differently, we could have quite different ethical beliefs. Hence this leaves morality redundant.

Another evolutionary account comes from Philip Kitcher, who offers a naturalized virtue ethic. On his view, evolution gave us certain capacities to empathize with others. These faculties are limited and morality has for its function to extend such empathy. What we morally ought to do follows from the traits we ought to develop, which depends on the sorts of creatures that we are. Rather than explaining moral obligations, however, Kitcher explains them away. On his account, it is a good idea to follow certain rules, and to coerce the unwilling to follow them, in order to maintain functional harmony. This is merely prudential and far from moral obligations.

Scott M. James offers yet another evolutionary account. He takes on a response-dependency view, allowing him to affirm that moral facts are real, though mind-dependent. He thinks that this can be done in a way that makes moral facts objective. He adopts a tracking account that says our minds evolved in the way they did because they were tracking moral facts. His proposal has two parts. The first part talks about how we developed a special sensitivity to how others would view our behavior. He thinks the evolution of our particular moral sense was the result of the recognition of facts about hypothetical agreement. He claims that we first evolved a disposition to consider how others would likely react to our behavior. This allowed cooperation. However, keeping track of the responses of others would be a challenge. The solution is to ask this hypothetical question: if your counterpart were only seeking principles that all could agree to live by, would he have any reason to condemn your behavior? Over time, we became only concerned with the evaluations of a hypothetical observer. By the time modern humans evolved, we had moral minds that place special weight on how others would respond to proposed courses of action. Second, many primate societies and extant hunter-gather tribes have a strong tendency towards egalitarianism (the view that supports equality). Third, certain studies suggest that the earliest (recognizably) moral communities exemplify the social contract tradition of morality. Finally, there is cross-cultural evidence of this.

In the second part, he lays out a metaethical story about what moral judgments are and about what makes them true. On his view, an action is wrong just in case others (who have an interest in general rules governing behavior) would tend to object to that action.

Baggett and Walls have a few worries. First is a Euthyphro dilemma problem. Is an action right because hypothetical observers say so, or do hypothetical observers say so because it is right? Baggett and Walls are skeptical that what hypothetical observers say becomes true because they say it. Rather, hypothetical observers would say it because it is true. Second, some empirical evidence that James cites underdetermine the answer to what is at question here. Even if something that externally looks like a social contract is empirically verified in the earliest moral communities, the question of what makes something right/wrong has still not been answered. The social contract can be based on a shared recognition of objectively true moral principles (independent of the social contract). Lastly, this still does not account for the strong sense of moral obligations which includes, guilt for violation, its binding authority, and the like.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 5: Introduction and 5.1

In the previous chapter, Hare argued that it is not possible to deduce the human good from human nature. But if the human good cannot be determined this way, then where should we look? Hare suggests that those who believe in God may find that God’s commands provide a rationally satisfying and sufficiently specific account of the human good. Therefore, in chapter 5, Hare takes a theological turn. Hare utilizes the insight of the prodigious theologian Karl Barth to flesh out some of the implications of God’s commands.

Hare emphasizes that though Barth is a theologian, he ably interacts with key philosophical ideas (especially Kant’s ideas) and he brings an awareness of the whole Christian theological and philosophical tradition to bear in his works. Barth thus provides Hare with a synthesis of exegetical, theological, and philosophical reflections on the commands of God.

Hare focuses on three themes in Barth’s treatment of God’s command: “the particularity of God’s commands, our freedom in response to the command, and our access to the command.” Barth suggests that the simple fact that we are commanded implies several things. First, God’s commands are given to particular people at a particular time. They are given to “responders,” who are “centers of agency.” Being commanded further implies that we can be obedient and bring about change in the world. We must also persist through time, through the hearing of the command to the realization of it. God’s command of us also suggests that we are sufficiently free to obey or not. And, if God commands us, we must be competent users of language to be able to understand the command.

The first Barthian theme that Hare explores is the particularity of the command (and this is the subject of section 1). Though there is a universal command to respect life, God commands specific persons. This respect begins with respect for one’s own life. But what does it mean to respect one’s own life? Barth rejects the notion that the substance of this command can be fleshed out through autonomous human reason. To attempt to establish what one must do on her own steam is both a denial of what she is (a finite and fallible creature) and a denial of who God is (utterly sovereign). Further, Barth holds that God’s has a highly specific form of life for every person. It is this form of life to which God calls us, and not to some merely general human good. Therefore, God’s plan cannot be captured in generalized statements about what humans ought to be. Rather, God has intimate and specific desires for each individual. We relate to God not only as a species, but person to person in the mode of “Thou-I.” Barth thinks we ought to allow God to completely determine for us what we are to do in every situation because of who he is and what we are in relation to him.

Hare argues that in this regard Barth stands more in the tradition of Scotus than of Aristotle and Plato. Rather than think that all humans have the same essence, Barth holds that each human being is a unique essence and this distinguishes them from other human beings (each person is a “haecceity”). Humanity shares a common nature, but we each have a distinct essence. Hare quotes the passage from Revelation that teaches that God has a name for each human written on a white stone. Hare suggests this name is a representation of God’s purpose for our life and our haecceities. It is something only God knows and if we are going to live according to it, we must rely on God’s commands to us. For Barth, the end of man is to love God and others in a particular way as a reflection of the love in the Trinity.

Kant thought that all our moral obligations could be captured in terms of the categorical imperative, which is universally applied to all humans in all cases. No reference to particular people (either as subject or object) could be allowed or else the imperative could not be universalized.

Hare thinks this universal morality is too restrictive because there are clear cases where moral obligations rightly are limited to particular people in specific circumstances. To help support this point, Hare distinguishes four positions in moral judgment: addressee, agent, recipient, and action. Any of these elements may take on a specific, non-universal character. God may, for example, tell Joshua (the addressee) that the priests (the agent) should march around Jericho seven times (the action). Hare also points out Jesus’ greatest commandment, which is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind,” is not universalizable in the recipient position. Jesus is not saying, “love whoever or whatever is God with all your heart.” He is saying, “Love this specific God, who has a historical connection with Israel, with all your heart.” Thus, there seem to be cases where we have moral obligations that cannot be captured in all universalist terms. Of course, if these are genuine moral obligations, then Kant’s formulation, that “we have to treat humanity, whether in our own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end in itself, and never merely as a means,” would need to be qualified.

To further support his case for qualifying the categorical imperative, Hare produces the hypothetical case of his friend, Elizabeth, who needs a bat removed from her house. Hare argues that he does have a moral obligation to help Elizabeth, but that this obligation is not generated by an appeal to Elizabeth’s humanity. In other words, it does not obtain by appeal to the Kantian maxim as stated above. If it did, then Hare would be obligated to help anyone who needed bats removed whoever they were. What grounds the obligation is Hare’s relationship to Elizabeth in her particularity. The obligation exists just because Elizabeth is Elizabeth and Hare stands in special relation to Elizabeth that he does not share with humanity in general. Hare adds that he loves Elizabeth for her haecceity (her unique essence), and not merely because she is human. And since loving another for her own sake is characteristic of a moral relation, then it would seem he does have an obligation to Elizabeth just because of who she is and his relation to her. Of course, the particularist nature of this moral obligation does not mean that morality reduces to particularities. Usually, universal moral judgments accompany the particular. For example, “One ought to help one’s friend” accompanies “Hare ought to help Elizabeth.”

Finally, Hare wants to show how Barth’s view of God’s commands can be understood to be both particular and universal. So far, the discussion has emphasized the particularity of God’s commands to specific people, but Barth also thinks that many of God’s commands have universal validity.

To help show the consistency of Barth’s view, Hare lays out some important distinctions. First, Hare notes that Barth makes a distinction between instruction and reflection. By “instruction,” Barth has in mind something like the Ten Commandments. These commands give instruction and provide an opportunity and context for us to think through what we know about God and ourselves. After instruction comes reflection. In reflection, we take what he learned from instruction and apply to our own case; we hear God’s command to us in our place and time. Though the instruction is given to a particular people in a particular place, instruction provides the basis for our knowing what God is like and preparing ourselves to act as he wishes.

The narrative of the Bible in which the commands are embedded are to shape our moral sense. Hare clarifies Barth’s discussion of this by introducing the distinction between the good and the obligatory. All of God’s commands are good, but God does not command all that is good. So in every case of God’s commanding, he commands something good and this connection to goodness is universal. All of God’s commands are objectively and universally good. God’s commands as instruction show us what God values and they teach us the character of the good. The commands of God in the Bible, then, are not abstract laws that admit of no exceptions. Instead, they are didactic, shaping our moral sense. We can through instruction, know goodness in advance and that goodness is universally required, per Barth, but we cannot know what our obligation will be in a given case. This is because we need God to tell us “which good kind of thing we are now to realize, to which particular recipients.” Knowing what we are to do in a particular case requires reflection and dependence upon God and his Word. (One may wonder, given this dependence, what need we have for moral deliberation. Hare promises to address this later in the chapter.)

Hare sees some similarities between the morality of Barth and Kant. Both Barth and Kant agree that our obligations come to us independent of what we desire, though this does not mean desire and obligation are ultimately in conflict. But more importantly, both Barth and Kant have a “public” morality. For Kant, the formulation of the categorical imperative must be endorsable by all members of the kingdom of ends. For Barth, the act of obeying a divine command means making the claim that the “commander whose commands establish the covenant obligations for all human beings.” Further, Barth says that all divine commands are given to members of a body, humans in a community. This community provides accountability and a way to test the commands, through the communal hearing of the instruction and through reflection, whether the commands are from God or not.

John Hare’s God’s Command, 4.4.3, “The Good Promise-Keeper”

For human natural goodness, Foot gives the example of an anthropologist who made a promise to a Malayan native never to photograph him. Later he could get away with doing it, and the picture would have been valuable, but he had made a promise. Foot commented about this case that 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 (though not absolute) the harmlessness of its violation does not annul. Breaking the promise would have been defective. She thought there was a “natural-history story” to explain why the disposition to break a promise is defective, just as much as there is a natural-history story to explain why it is a defect not to be able to walk or see. She used Anscombe’s story about the need for the institution of promising if we are going to be able to get each other to do the sorts of things that constitute the human form of life.

RMH, in contrast, argued that promising creates an obligation in this way: if a speaker says sincerely that all promises are acts of placing oneself under (undertaking) an obligation to do the thing promised, he must himself be expressing his own subscription to the rule of the institution of promising and thus stating a moral principle. There is no deduction, therefore, from a fact to an obligation. It’s characteristic of words like “promise,” which have meaning only within institutions, that they can be introduced into language only when certain synthetic propositions about how we should act are assented to.

Foot thought there was a deduction of our obligation to keep our promises from our human form of life. Keeping our promises is an instance of justice, she thought, and she said that justice is one of the virtues that is an “Aristotelian necessity.” Foot was not an absolutist about keeping promises. Apart from killing the innocent, torture is the only absolute prohibition she mentioned. Torture was also an absolute prohibition for RMH, who spoke out of his own experience as a prisoner of the Japanese in WW2.

At any rate, Hare thinks Foot’s deduction doesn’t work. She treats our nature too much as a single unified package, and she was too optimistic in her account of practical rationality as sensitivity to the reasons this package gives us. Consider things like the fact that humans lie, cheat, or steal. Are these Aristotelian categoricals? Can we rule them out as irrelevant because they are not directly or indirectly related to our survival and reproduction? The accusation here is not that Foot was trying to deduce moral goodness from biology or from the inclinations we supposedly share with the hunter-gatherers who formed most of our evolutionary history. Other philosophers have tried to do this and failed.

For example, Arnhart argued that the good is the desirable (as in Aquinas) and the desirable is what is generally desired by human beings. By “generally desired” he meant that these desires are found in most people in every society throughout human history, and he thought evolution had given us these desires because they enhanced our chances of survival and reproduction. He listed twenty such desires, and his framework principle was that if a desire is general in this sense, belonging to this list, then its fulfillment is good. He did not find disinterested benevolence among these desires, and he concluded that it is merely utopian, beyond the order of nature, and foisted on us by religion.

Hare thinks it instructive to compare Arnhart with Foot on these points. Foot said that there is the same form of inference for humans and for wolves, from the Aristotelian categoricals about a form of life to conclusions about goodness. Unlike Arnhart she pointed out that Wittgenstein said at his end that he had had a wonderful life, but she said that he was not, in any ordinary sense, happy. Happiness is the human good only if we think of happiness in the way we discussed in relation to the letter-writers earlier, for whom it was already too late for happiness. But this kind of happiness is an ideal, and there is the same kind of difficulty as we found with RMH’s treatment of ideals. Foot had a worked-out theory about moral goodness in terms of natural facts and then had trouble integrating into it the distinction between the natural traits we should admire and the natural traits we should not. She included among Aristotelian categoricals seeking justice, but not the desire for power over others. This is better than Arnhart, but there’s a price. We know with Arnhart where his conclusions come from, even if we disagree with them. He faced the nasty as well as the nice aspects of our nature, and he was consistent about how we should live. In the same way Aristotle was. For Foot, by contrast, there was a gap. The categoricals for plants and non-human animals are supposed to be reached by saying how for a certain species nourishment was obtained, how development took place, what defenses were available, and how reproduction was secured. Answers to such questions for humans come in terms of deception and coercion, just as much as the recognition of rights. Foot was right to want a different way to think about the human good. But she did not give us a method for doing so that is “naturalistic” in the way the claim about the same “form of inference” from categoricals to virtues implies.

Hare thinks one basic problem is that the four natural ends given by Hursthouse don’t cohere, which means that our nature is not harmonious in the way she needs and claims. She wants to reject the view that human nature is “just a mess,” because she thinks this leads to moral nihilism and despair. But she does not consider the possibility that we are not exactly a mess, but a mixture of the kind Kant describes. This means that we are, as she denies, a “battleground.” There’s a dilemma here for her. Either the Aristotelian categoricals need to be already screened by ethical principle, in which case we get a deduction from nature only by this screening. Or we can allow that any typical feature leading to the four natural ends is a virtue, but then we will not get the deduction of a conclusion about moral goodness or the good human life. It’s better to allow that most of what we think constitutes a good human life comes from our ideals, which are not deducible from the four ends at all, though these ends are constraints on our ideals.

Another way to put the dilemma is that Hursthouse has two theses that conflict, when conjoined, with her admission that much of the work in deciding how to live does not come from the four ends, and that there is no fifth end characteristic of human animals from which to derive these decisions. These two theses are, first, what Hare calls “virtue dominance” and, second, deductivism about virtue. If the virtues are to be deducible from our nature, then they ought to give us a great deal more content about how to live than the admission that there is no fifth end implies.

We should concede that our nature puts a constraint on what we should say about a good human life and therefore about obligation. Foot and Hursthouse are right that it makes sense to talk about a human specific good, at least in ordinary speech, and so to talk about the kinds of human goodness that contribute to it. Even so, such facts don’t obligate us. Hare thinks the one exception is that we have a self-evident obligation to love God and neighbor, but none of the more specific obligations of the second table follow.

For DCT, it is God’s command that obligates. We should have the faith, though, that God wants our good, and commands us to live in a way that will be conducive to this end. So, even though obligations are not (with one exception) deducible from facts about human nature, those facts can serve as constraints on what we should believe about how God has commanded us to live. Does DCT derive an ought from an is? Hare thinks not, but defending his view is subtle. It’s true that God’s commanding something makes it obligatory, and that this is the right criterion (according to DCT) for the judgment that we ought to live a certain way. But we have to make what is the criterion our criterion, by a decision of the will.

Practical rationality can give us contradictory maxims, both of which fit the facts of human nature, unless we’ve rigged those facts by incorporating ideals into their specification. It’s not silly to be torn on occasion, even torn apart. When we bring the interests of others into the picture, especially the interests of those not related to us by friendship or family, most of us in the richer parts of the world fail most of the time. We simply do not think about the impact our own lifestyles have on those who are suffering in the rest of the world. Foot was herself not blind in this way, but she was too optimistic about the rest of us.

Hursthouse ends with the need for hope that we can flourish together, and not at each other’s expense, and she knows that this hope used to be called belief in (God’s) Providence. If we can’t rely on our nature to produce this ethical commonwealth, though, because our nature is a mixture of good and evil, then what is the ground of this hope? It must be something beyond our nature, and God’s sovereignty is an answer to be considered, as we did in the argument from providence in the first chapter.