I'm redating this post.
I think there are two cases of atheistic morality that would have to be considered. Some world-views are not theistic per se but believe that there is a given purpose for human existence. If you accept something like Aristotle's inherent purposes (Aristotle had the unmoved mover but the UMM is not a personal God), then what is right fulfils that purpose and what is wrong fails to do so. I'm not sure that the idea of inherent purpose makes sense without the idea of intended purpose, but if you bought that it looks like you can get an objective moral standard out of it.
A theistic account of morality would, I think, combine the idea that as creatures of God we are created in such a way that our intended purposes and our inherent purposes are identical: we fulfill our purpose as human beings by doing what we were made to do. (How that solves particular problems like abortion, for example, may be more difficult, but right now I'm just working on the general idea of a moral life).
If you're going without God and without inherent purpose, then I think Hume is about the best source. He pointed out that a lot of ethical behavior can be justified by enlightened self-interest or social utility, and that we have feeling of sympathy for one another. But with his system, I have trouble seeing why we should do the right thing when it isn't in our enlightened self-interest and when we are feeling a lot of other feelings a lot more strongly than we feel sympathy. Why should sympathy trump other, stronger, feelings?
9 comments:
I don't think either the Aristotelian route of inherent purpose or the Humean route of morality's social utility 'save the appearances'---i.e., they don't do justice to the full content and meaning of our very strong moral intuitions.
The vast majority of people have a very strong moral conviction that burning babies for fun is wrong. Such a conviction is not equivalent to 'liking children'. A race of baby burners could like children. They could, for instance, like the way they scream while on fire. They could like all children apart from those selected to be burnt as babies because they're Jewish babies.
Naturalism derives whatever plausibility it has from sensory experience. Naturalists thus believe that Jupiter exists and has a certain shape and size, etc. There may be some people who think Jupiter has bad case of acne, or is streaked with paint, or is smaller than the Earth because when they looked at it through a telescope once, it looked smaller. No matter, beliefs about Jupiter may vary somewhat, but the naturalist will say, regardless of that, here are the objective facts about Jupiter. And they make their case that those are objective facts because typical sensory experiences relating to Jupiter are such-and-such.
OK. But the experiential data of humans is not limited to sensory data. Most people experience that they are strongly obligated by moral conscience and that conscience dictates that burning babies for fun is absolutely prohibited. This includes unhappy parents who may, in extreme circumstances, actually feel a strong inclination to throw the screaming baby of theirs in a furnace, and even imagine momentarily that they'd take pleasure in doing that. Still, overriding such feelings is their experience of an absolute objective prohibition against doing so. And so they don't do it (hopefully).
But, by parity of reasoning with the Jupiter case, this should yield an objective moral fact, just as that case yields an objective sensory fact. Both are rock solidly grounded in very common and typical and repeatable and predictable experiential data. So the naturalist attempt to deny the objectivity of morality undercuts not only morality, but naturalism itself, since naturalism rests upon very common, predictable experiential data.
Suppose there is a Satanist who wants to burn babies. He has lot of money and offers 10 million dollars to any mother of a newborn infant who will hand over the infant to be burned alive. Mutual benefit seems assured. Most moms of newborns would love to get 10 million bucks. But most would not hand over their infant children for Satanic sacrifice; not for 10 million bucks. Not for anything. Even if guaranteed against criminal charges.
And it's not just their own babies they feel this about. They would feel it about all babies, even the babies of people they strongly dislike.
This type of intuition goes way beyond inherent purposes or social utility. Neither of those properly accounts for our moral experience---the experience, as it were of Good and Evil.
This experience cannot be plausibly explained by evolutionary naturalism. It is in my view decisive objection to that theory as a complete worldview, even if it admits of no strict demonstration. In that regard it's like a toothache—--you know it's there but you can't absolutely demonstrate it's there to anyone else. You just have to wait until they get a toothache of their own. (One can substitute orgasms for toothaches if you find the latter too depressing an example.)
The anti-naturalist account starts with noticing that there's more to complexity than just material complexity. There are also 'pure' forms of informational complexity--—the type of complexity, for instance, involved in very advanced kinds of mathematics, computer programming, philosophical reasoning, and in devising codes. There is also moral and aesthetic complexity (think of Sophie’s Choice; think of the Mona Lisa or the Pieta or King Lear or Tosca or, er, Britney Javelins). I would add as distinct kinds, sensual and emotional complexity (the taste of a Sauternes and—--moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, or is it the other way round?—-the joy and heartbreak of teenage crushes).
At first sight, all these might seem perfectly understandable as simply natural, albeit not simply material phenomena. But upon closer inspection, this judgement I think betrays an inadequate understanding of, or sensitivity to, their true character and significance. All such phenomena disclose not simply complexity, and not simply non-material complexity; but rather, transcendent value. And I am very confident that no natural designer can design that. It can’t be designed or created. It exists necessarily and can only be contained in minds: in God’s infinitely and eternally, and in ours finitely for now.
These phenomena point to transcendent value by disclosing to us not merely irreducible complexity, but irreducible normativity. All of them suggest norms by which to evaluate and judge, by which to think, and by which to live. They reveal not simply the possibility of complex mathematics, or complex philosophical thought, or complex art, or complex emotions; they reveal good mathematics, good philosophy, good art, good emotions—in short, they reveal Good Life, or, Goodness (which is a human codeword for God, just as 'God' is a human codeword for Goodness). They reveal Good Being.
In fact, we begin to see that these phenomena are all logically structured by normative properties; they are an essential and built-in feature of these forms of complex information.
I style the concept of God as the concept of ‘infinite self-communicating information’. Logically, God has to be self-communicating because he's the First Cause of information (hence it's not originally communicated by anything else). And God has to be conscious, because unlimited information must be self-aware (if it wasn't, that would constitute a limit on information; and God has to be perfectly rational and moral, because infinite information includes all the truths of reason and morality (and perfect understanding of them).
When we begin to understand goodness, we begin to grasp that goodness wouldn't be as good as it should be if it were essentially or necessarily incomplete. Or better, we start to understand, perhaps only dimly at first, or perhaps as delightedly as a very happy child, that it's actually incoherent--—it literally doesn't make sense—---to think or to imagine goodness as being necessarily or inherently, or intrinsically, not as good as it's logically possible for goodness to be, not as good as… well, perfect goodness. On the contrary, we begin to sense, if we are properly or even merely averagely well attuned to it, that goodness cannot even really be goodness, if its essence is finite. It's a necessary truth that unlimited goodness is better—--more good--—than limited goodness. But like pain, goodness essentially involves consciousness. Hence goodness's own informational logic must stretch out transcendently before us, pointing to the infinite horizons of consciousness.
And it is only really in this light that the sheer enormity and hideously disfiguring monstrosity of sin and evil even become clear to us. Evil is the insanity that seeks to tear holes in the unending, beautifully colored fabric of goodness. Thank goodness this fabric is endless. I say 'insanity', for who in their right mind, in their good mind, would wish to put a limit to goodness? And who but someone insane could imagine that he could tear anything but a finite hole in an infinite fabric?
But the astounding and essential thing is that when we truly do attend to the goodness around us and in us, we begin to find that its real nature, like all things whose essence involves consciousness, cannot be different from its genuine appearance.
When goodness announces its presence, we identify it by its characteristic spiritual ‘mark’, which discloses to us that goodness's own reality is literally transcendent, literally infinite, and literally inviting. And hence, we find in this analogia boni that goodness is not, and cannot be, explained by a natural designer or a material process like evolution. For design too is an essentially normative concept; and so any natural designer such as evolution necessarily designs in virtue of norms that are not and cannot merely be the designer's own products; for all such products of a natural designer are particular and finite, whereas the true norms of design, like all true norms of rational consciousness as such, are transcendent in nature.
It's not the case that goodness is any way anti-natural. Rather, it is what Augustine addressed as transcendent beauty, ever ancient, ever new; and a vison of which caused Aquinas to liken all his writings to mere straw; and whom Blaise Pascal, mathematical genius, inventor of one the earliest computers, and brilliant defender of both the scientific method and the Christian faith, experienced in one unforgettable, incandescent spiritual transport, as recorded in his Memorial, discovered after his death seven years later.
And so this eternal, designing Act of Goodness, who creates and subsumes all finite goods within itself and transcends them to infinity is, most definitely, 'super'-natural. Because goodness itself is. Goodness is inherently transcendent, inherently infinite…
"So the naturalist attempt to deny the objectivity of morality undercuts not only morality, but naturalism itself..."
This is a very tired and hackneyed straw man. Naturalists do not deny the existence of "objective" moral principles, only that moral principles exist independently of the human psyche.
And in case you fail to see the difference, I should clarify that I am adopting your own functional definition of "objective" in this context, namely "universal" (or almost universal). As in "The vast majority of people have a very strong moral conviction that burning babies for fun is wrong."
Naturalists recognize that many moral principles are universal, and believe that these simply reflect our common psychological heritage. Equally, it is clear (to naturalists and theists alike) that many moral principles are rooted in particular societal or community norms. And, crucially for theistic claims about "transcendental" morality, the only way to determine whether a given moral principle is universal or particular is through observation.
There is more than a little irony in the fact that modern theists are reduced to using empirical arguments to establish the existence of universal moral principles, which theism is supposed to guarantee _a priori_. A medieval Christian, if asked for an example of an absolute moral rule, would not have proposed something as anodyne as "Do not burn babies for fun" but would probably have cited a long list of particular community taboos like "Do not eat meat on Fridays" or "Do not leave an infant unbaptized" or "Do not marry a widow before her husband is 40 days dead". Unfortunately for the modern theist, we are nowadays familiar with such an extraordinary diversity of moral systems that any attempt to claim that one of them could provide the basis for a universal morality would be laughed out of court.
I am aware that all of this is just a rehash of the "Argument from Disagreement", but it is such a strong argument that it bears repeating. Anyone who believes that theism provides a foundation for absolute morality is invited to explain how theism can help us decide whether the following behaviors are immoral or morally neutral:
* abortion (female fetuses only)
* euthanasia
* the death penalty
* bride burning
* eating pork
* animal experimentation
* working on the Sabbath
* waterboarding and other forms of military torture
* smoking marijuana
* suicide
* suicide bombings
* genetic engineering
* discretionary warfare
* polygamy
* honor killing
* judicial rape
No doubt you have opinions about all of these (as I do), but in each case there are large religious (or ethnic or political) communities that believe the behavior in question is no worse than morally neutral.
I wrote:
"So the naturalist attempt to deny the objectivity of morality undercuts not only morality, but naturalism itself..."
Anonymous responded:
"
This is a very tired and hackneyed straw man. Naturalists do not deny the existence of "objective" moral principles, only that moral principles exist independently of the human psyche."
Maybe anonymous should read up a bit more on modern moral philosophy:
Here
and
here .
Anonymous wrote:
I am aware that all of this is just a rehash of the "Argument from Disagreement", but it is such a strong argument that it bears repeating.
If it bears repeating, then so does what I wrote. Here it is again, with emphases added:
...No matter, beliefs about Jupiter may vary somewhat, but the naturalist will say, regardless of that, here are the objective facts about Jupiter. And they make their case that those are objective facts because typical sensory experiences relating to Jupiter are such-and-such.
OK. But the experiential data of humans is not limited to sensory data. Most people experience that they are strongly obligated by moral conscience and that conscience dictates that burning babies for fun is absolutely prohibited. This includes unhappy parents who may, in extreme circumstances, actually feel a strong inclination to throw the screaming baby of theirs in a furnace, and even imagine momentarily that they'd take pleasure in doing that. Still, overriding such feelings is their experience of an absolute objective prohibition against doing so. And so they don't do it (hopefully).
But, by parity of reasoning with the Jupiter case, this should yield an objective moral fact, just as that case yields an objective sensory fact. Both are rock solidly grounded in very common and typical and repeatable and predictable experiential data. So the naturalist attempt to deny the objectivity of morality undercuts not only morality, but naturalism itself, since naturalism rests upon very common, predictable experiential data.
Let me add this thought:
In fact, there are very possibly more people who harbor beliefs about Jupiter---beliefs about how far it is from Earth, say---which are non-standard relative to the science about Jupiter, than there are people who hold non-standard views about the proposition that it's morally wrong to burn babies for fun.
So the Argument from Disagreement is not all that cogent
Dear Mr Stunney,
I made it abundantly clear in my first post that naturalists quite happily agree that there exist moral principles that human beings universally (or almost universally) believe in. This is just as true of moral skeptics, error theorists and moral non-cognitivists as it is of any other flavor of naturalist you might care to dig up out of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. What naturalists generally do not believe is that moral principles exist independently of the human psyche.
Repeatedly citing one universal moral principle and making specious comparisons of it with beliefs about Jupiter no more proves the transcendental nature of morality than drawing attention to the fact that everyone feels pain, boredom and irritation proves that pain, boredom and irritation exist independently of the human psyche.
On more relevant matters, I notice that you didn't offer to explain which of the behaviors on my list would be condemned by an objective morality. You claim that your theism gives you some special insights into the nature of objective morality, so don't be shy. Please share these insights with the rest of us.
Anonymous wrote:
Naturalists do not deny the existence of "objective" moral principles, only that moral principles exist independently of the human psyche.
That may be bad news for any sentient and rational inhabitants of other parts of the universe.
What are the quotation marks doing around 'objective'? Is "objective" equivalent to: 'not really objective'?
If so, then naturalists do deny that there are really objective moral principles.
If, on the other hand, "objective" means objective, why bother putting quotation marks around the word?
Now, as I use the term, 'objective morality' is similar to 'objective physical world'. Many, many people have held conflicting and often erroneous beliefs about the latter. Indeed, it may well be the case that most beliefs ever held about the objective physical world have been and are erroneous. How many people have known anything about quantum physics, let alone know if it describes the physical world as it is in itself, for example? Not too many. But this does not entail that no objective physical world exists.
It may well be the case that most beliefs ever held about what objective morality enjoins have been and are erroneous too; how many people know anything about Rawls' Difference Principle, let alone know whether it accurately describes what objective morality truly enjoins as a standard of justice, for example? Not too many. This does not entail that no objective morality exists.
In other words, for there to be an objective truth about either the physical world or about morality just means that it's independent of any given human psyche, and implies that it's possible every human being's belief about a given physical or moral fact is mistaken.
Scientists often state that physical theories are provisional, but they also believe it would take a discovery of unimaginable proportions to overturn the core beliefs of physical sciences. I think most human beings hold moral beliefs in a quite similar way. There have been dramatic changes in beliefs about, for instance, the moral acceptability of homosexual relationships and of second-class citizenship for women and blacks in just about the same period of time since the discovery of quantum mechanics. But yes, baby-burning for fun is still a no-no, as are perpetual motion machines.
What are we to say then about theism's relation to ethics? Well, the first thing is that theism is a philosophical hypothesis that centers on the concept of a transcendent creator in whom reason and goodness are perfectly and eternally realized. This hypothesis is logically independent of the claims made by any specific religion as to whether this creator's will is revealed through a particular prophet or text.
Just as such, then, theism implies no more than that we should be guided in our ethical lives by the norms of right reason. (Even within some specific religious traditions, this idea is explicitly adopted, as for example in Aquinas' natural law ethics.)
However, unlike mere material objects, reason and morality of necessity implicate minds; and minds seem to be more recalcitrant than subatomic particles when it comes to yielding up the kind of control and certainty so many materialists seem to crave. Having said that, most people do seem to have an intuitive understanding of some central moral concepts, such as honesty, compassion, mutual aid, fairness, and avoidance of cruelty or gratuitous violence.
Theism per se no more would predict that objective moral norms will be arbitrary than that objective rational norms be arbitrary, since theism's God is perfectly rational and perfectly moral. In fact, atheists pay their dues to theism every time they invoke, as they nearly all do in practice, universal, objective rational and moral norms. Theism explains why this should be so. Evolutionary naturalism can't do so persuasively, since of course it prescribes no norms nor positive evaluations whatsoever.
I think Victor is dead on the money here. But that's because I'm a virtue ethics person (Victor, have you read Rosalind Hursthouse's Virtue Ethics and/or Philippa Foot's Natural Virtue? Very rich stuff!).
However, I'm not sure why inherent telos requires intended telos. Wouldn't that entail that God has no inherent telos? And if God requires no intended telos in order to have inherrent telos, why do we?
Best,
EA
Whoops! Foot's book is entitled 'Natural Goodness'; not 'Natural Virtue'.
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