Wednesday, August 01, 2007

Mark Linville's argument against ethical naturalism

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mark is a friend of mine from my school days. I'm happy to see him writing with such excellence.

I'd just like to comment on one thing he said at the end:

I am as certain that recreational baby-strangling is wrong as I am that I have a head and that it is not made of glass. Neither belief is had by way of inference. Both seem
warranted. And both are such as to be accepted ineluctably by all people whose faculties are in good repair.


Given the fact that in the Bible we see God was pleased when babies were dashed against the rocks, I find it difficult to accept this statement by Mark, even if I agree that we should not strangle babies. It is a historically contitioned one, and not shared universally even today, given Saddam Hussein's atocities and the massacre taking place right now in Darfur. Since these wicked people are all convinced they had heads not made of glass, then his ethical beliefs are not as certain, by far, as his belief that he has a head not made of glass.

Mark continues therefore, I think, with a non-sequitur when he wrote:

But the theist can explain why this is so in a way that the naturalist cannot. Our moral faculties have been fashioned in the “same shop” by “the same artist” as our other cognitive faculties.

But if people have disagreed about strangling babies, then there is nothing for the theist to explain, in my opinion.

Anonymous said...

For Mark to disagree, he'll surely point out that he said "recreational baby strangling." Is Psalm 137:9 recreational baby killing?: "Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!" [New Revised Standard Version]

I can't make entirely good sense of his idea of "recreational," since people who kill babies, including the female babies who die as the result of being gang raped at the direction of African witchdoctors as a cure to AIDS, do so because they have a reason to do it. No one does something entirely and purely without a reason, even if the overwhelming majority of modern civilized people reject that reason. Those who do, indeed lack in cognitive faculties, but this would equally apply to any mentally challenged person who does anything. People have a reason for why they do so, even if modern civilized people would all disagree with their reasons, and those people are the ones Mark is writing to convince of his argument.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, Victor, for posting this.

However, I have to say that two readers at a fine journal recently gave this version an enthusiastic thumbs down!

One lingering complaint is that my argument assumes that the Darwinian naturalist must buy the assumptions of the sociobiologists.
Such assumptions include the notion that nearly every universal human trait, including the cognitive, is subject to a genetic explanation.

I do take pains even in the present version to assure that I do not assume this. Note, for instance, the discussion of Dennett's critique of "greedy reductionism" I is there a "pointy-end-first" gene?), and the classic passage from Kitcher's Vaulting Ambition.

I follow Sharon Street in her distinction between "basic evaluative attitudes" and "full fledged moral beliefs." She argues that natural selection has had a tremendous and direct influence on the former, and that these, in turn, influence the latter. When you consider the sorts of counterfactual situations that I present in my paper (e.g., Darwin's hive bee example) it becomes plausible to suppose that, had the contingencies of the evolutionary landscape differed relevantly then the contents of our moral beliefs would likely have been different. And so those beliefs are ultimately determined by whatever selection pressures happened to be in place.

A pdf of Street's excellent paper is available at

http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1177/DarwinianDilemma.pdf

Street's paper poses a dilemma. The moral realist who embraces darwinian naturalism owes an account of the relation between the (a) belief-producing mechanisms for our moral beliefs and (b) the truth-makers for those beliefs. The realist can here either assert a relation or deny that there is one at all.

If she denies a relation, then natural slection should be viewed as having a distorting influence, and it would be a cosmic accident of sorts if we ever happened to end up with true moral beliefs. The result is an unpalatable skepticism.

If she asserts a relation, then it comes in either of two flavors: a "tracking" relation or an "adaptive link" relation. The former suggests that those processes responsible for our moral beliefs "track" the truth about morality. That is to say, our moral beliefs are adaptive because they are true. She argues that this, while required for realism, is very improbable (and unparsimonious) from a scientific perspective. Do we really need the extra furnishings of moral facts or properties in order to explain our beliefs?

On the other hand, the adaptive link relation holds that we have our beliefs because they are the one that, given the relevant selection pressures, are adaptive. They are thus primarily "fitness-aimed" rather than "truth-aimed." But then, if we are to speak of truth at all in this context, it is more likely to think of it from a perspective of some variety of constructivism.

Mark

Anonymous said...

Hi, John. Thanks for pointing out that my paper was linked here.

As for the sort of objection you raise, my initial reply is that if I thought the weakest premise of my argument was "Baby-strangling is wrong" then I would be happy to have constructed a compelling argument.

Second, in this paper, I conceive my philosophical opponent chiefly as the naturalist who embraces moral realism. So my opponent and I would apparently have that in common against you. The moral argument is often represented as follows:

(1) If morality is objective then God exists.

(2) Morality is objective

(3) Therefore, God exists.

I've not taken a poll, but I have the impression that more and more philosophers who wish to challenge the moral argument agree with (2) but challenge (1). These are the people whose views I find the most compelling and who present the more formidable challenge to a moral argument.

I think I detect two points in your objection, both of which have beeen presented by Gilbert Harman, among others.

(1) Our moral beliefs are "historically conditioned." This being so, we can explain our having even widespread beliefs by appeal to processes that do not require their truth.

(2) There is widespread and intractable disagreement about moral beliefs. Such disagreement is best explained is we suppose that there are no moral facts.

The objection at (1) is met by Nick Sturgeon and discussed at some length in my paper. Sturgeon's reply to Harman is remarkably similar to Plantinga's reply to common de jure objections to religious belief. Freud maintained that religious belief is the yield of "wish-fulfillment," and wish-fulfillment is a belief-producing mechanism that is not truth-aimed. But Freud can know that belief in God is the product of a non-truth-aimed mechanism only if he already knows that it is false that God exists and makes His presence known to believers. After all, if there is a sensus divinitatus, or an internal witness of the Holy Spirit, then the mechanism that produced such beliefs is functioning properly and is truth-aimed.

Similarly, Harman has famously argued that objective moral facts are never required in order to explain any feature of the world. There is always a plausible social science explanation for anyone's behaving or believing as they do.

But we can know that the social science explanation is to be preferred only if we have already precluded moral explanations for the initial set of beliefs that we bring with us in reflective equilibrium. But what justifies this discrimination among beliefs?

As for your objection from moral disagreement, I highly recommend that you read Russ Shafer-Landau's Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? (Oxford). He makes a good presumptive case for some variety of moral realism (he calls it ethical objectivism) over against varieties of skepticism. It's a great little book that will serve as an intro for his somewhat more technical Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford). In both, he gives a great deal of attention to the Argument from Disagreement, and has some interesting things to say about it.

I like your hat.

--Mark

Anonymous said...

Thanks Mark, I'll have to get that book.

...and my hat is my signature. I'm now a bad man. ;-)

Cheers to ya.

I hope others take the time to read your excellent essay and comment.

Anonymous said...

I think James Sennett has a cool hat, too.

I feel left out.

Anonymous said...

I am familiar with the Street paper, and am in substantial agreement with its arguments. The two plausible mechanisms for moral epistemology within an evolutionary framework simply are not up to the task of overcoming skepticism. (Contra Street I remain a quasirealist rather than a full antirealist.)

But at least real science has any plausible candidate mechanisms there to be discussed at all. Remind me of the theistic "theory" of moral epistemology again? The magic apple, right?

Of course, we will be told, no "sophisticated" theist believes this (only the hundreds of millions of Americans who say they do). But then, how, specifically, does Yahweh impart moral knowledge? Is it the case that poor old Joe Schmoe is sitting there ratiocinating, about to come to the conclusion that maybe two consenting adults of the same gender have a basic human right to express their love for one another, when suddenly the order goes out and millions of tiny angels brace their shoulders against his neurons with a heave and a ho and force them into alignment until he realizes it's an abomination?

Seriously, can apologetics just please, please drop the "poking holes in naturalism" line and start actually making positive contributions to human knowledge? Sorry if I'm a little on edge, it's just that this thing gets tedious after a while.

Anonymous said...

You ask, "how, specifically, does Yahweh impart moral knowledge?"

That's a tough one.

How, specifically, is it the case that we humans are capable of knowing that modus ponens is a necessary relation or that there is an external world that is represented to us by our perceptions? Are you supposing that there is some sort of neurological account of what transpires when we acquire such knowledge? Is there a third-person description that captures all that is true of a first-person experience?

Is your conflation of theories in epistemology with scientific theories intentional? I would have thought that they are different kinds of things altogether.

As you likely know, it is debatable whether moral epistemology must have a strong empiricist bent. Today's ethical naturalists tend to work with the assumption that it must, and thus argue that moral facts are discoverable in the same manner as scientific facts.

Non-naturalists such as Shafer-Landau resist this, as they should. To insist that moral properties are detectable, if at all, only in ways that are open to empirical testing is to bias the debate against the existence of irreducibly normative, sui generis moral properties. Shafer-Landau thus argues for the "self-evidence" of certain moral principles. Must he offer some account of what is taking place among the neurons in someone's brain in order to make sense of this notion? I don't see that he should. Indeed, I see that he should not.

Theists can and do defend various epistemologies, moral and otherwise, that might be either internalist or externalist in nature. I see Plantinga's three volumes on warrant, for instance, as a "positive contribution to human knowledge." His arguments are largely free-standing--independent of his theistic commitments--but these are invoked in the appropriate places, for instance, where he discusses the role that design plays in understanding the notion of proper function.

Were you thinking that Plantinga has the special burden of explaining how God and his angels
are manipulating one's brain so as to yield warranted belief?

It is no argument against either non-naturalism or supernaturalism that its key concepts resist reduction to naturalist or physicalist terms, or that they cannot be described in the language of our best science. Rather, it simply amounts to asserting what is already known: the one view is not the other view.

Besides that, lots of things that you and I both include in our respective ontologies resist such reduction.

Anonymous said...

How, specifically, is it the case that we humans are capable of knowing that modus ponens is a necessary relation or that there is an external world that is represented to us by our perceptions? Are you supposing that there is some sort of neurological account of what transpires when we acquire such knowledge? Is there a third-person description that captures all that is true of a first-person experience?

I think all of these are legitimate questions that anyone trying to form a coherent view of the world might want to ask. Mutatis mutandis, it is legitimate for me to ask of the apologist whether there is even a theory there to be discussed.

How, specifically, does Yahweh impart moral knowledge?

Is your conflation of theories in epistemology with scientific theories intentional? I would have thought that they are different kinds of things altogether.

I wouldn’t’ve. You (I’m assuming the anonymous I’m addressing is Mark Linville, otherwise, apologies; I’m hardly helping things by posting anonymously myself) repeatedly appeal to Street’s arguments to the effect that realist moral naturalists cannot put forward a coherent theory of moral epistemology consistent with what we know from biological science. That these arguments are cogent is something I’ve said I agree with you on. But then, you must also accept that lack of a coherent explanatory theory is a legitimate criticism.

How, specifically, does Yahweh impart moral knowledge? What gain in explanatory power pertaining to moral epistemology might I expect if I adopt a theory predicated on an invisible man who lives in the sky?

Today's ethical naturalists tend to work with the assumption that it must, and thus argue that moral facts are discoverable in the same manner as scientific facts.

We may be talking past each other here. I see you are using the term “ethical naturalist” to refer specifically to realists, as opposed to any metaethical position taken consistent with naturalism. In that sense, then, I am not an ethical (realist) naturalist. I don’t think that moral facts are discoverable in the same manner as scientific facts.

Shafer-Landau thus argues for the "self-evidence" of certain moral principles. Must he offer some account of what is taking place among the neurons in someone's brain in order to make sense of this notion? I don't see that he should. Indeed, I see that he should not.

Two things.

First, I'm not on intimate terms with Shafer-Landau's specific arguments, so I can't really comment on them (references welcome), but on the face of it I'm deeply suspicious of when anyone looks at a hard problem and just declares it "sui generis" and his preferred solution "self-evident".

Second, of course I don't think that epistemology requires neuron-by-neuron accounts. I was providing an illustration of one example of what a real theory of something involving an invisible man who lives in the clouds might look like. Of course the scenario I presented is absurd. But if apologetics wants to progress beyond "poking holes in naturalism", it has to present some account with some explanatory power, or else there is simply nothing there to be discussed. I keep the following passage in my quotefile for occasions such as these:

"Doubtless many will reply that they can more easily conceive ten
millions of special creations to have taken place, than they can
conceive that ten millions of varieties have been produced by the
process of perpetual modification. All such, however, will find, on
candid inquiry, that they are under an illusion. This is one of the
many cases in which men do not really believe, but rather believe they believe. It is not that they can truly conceive ten millions of special creations to have taken place, but that they think they can do so. A little careful introspection will show them that they have never yet
realized to themselves the creation of even one species. If they have formed a definite conception of the process, they will be able to answer such questions as — How is a new species constructed? and How does it make its appearance? Is it thrown down from the clouds? or
must we hold to the notion that it struggles up out of the ground? Do
its limbs and viscera rush together from all the points of the compass?
or must we receive some such old Hebrew notion as, that God goes into a forest-cavern, and there takes clay and moulds a new creature? If they say that a new creature is produced in none of these modes, which are too absurd to be believed, then they are required to describe the mode
in which a new creature may be produced — a mode which does not seem absurd; and such a mode they will find that they neither have
conceived nor can conceive.
"Should the believers in special creations consider it unfair thus to call upon them to describe how special creations take place, I reply, that this is far less than they demand from the supporters of the development hypothesis. They are merely asked to point out a conceivable mode; on the other hand, they ask, not simply for a conceivable mode, but for the actual mode. They do not say — Show us
how this may take place; but they say — Show us how this does take place. So far from its being unreasonable to ask so much of them, it would be reasonable to ask not only for a possible mode of special creation, but for an ascertained mode; seeing that this is no greater a demand than they make upon their opponents."

-- Herbert Spencer, 'The Development Hypothesis', in 'The Leader', Mar. 20, 1852


Theists can and do defend various epistemologies, moral and otherwise, that might be either internalist or externalist in nature. I see Plantinga's three volumes on warrant, for instance, as a "positive contribution to human knowledge." His arguments are largely free-standing--independent of his theistic commitments--but these are invoked in the appropriate places, for instance, where he discusses the role that design plays in understanding the notion of proper function.

Does he have a model specifically for moral epistemology? Is it any better than his forehead-slappingly awful EAAN?

It is no argument against either non-naturalism or supernaturalism that its key concepts resist reduction to naturalist or physicalist terms, or that they cannot be described in the language of our best science. Rather, it simply amounts to asserting what is already known: the one view is not the other view.

On the contrary, it is a convincing argument against them. They are simply redescribing difficult problems as though difficulty were synonymous with impossibility, and claiming that this clever rebranding of our own ignorance constitutes knowledge.

Besides that, lots of things that you and I both include in our respective ontologies resist such reduction.

Well, I don't include moral facts in my ontology, so that's one problem I don't have.

Anonymous said...

I see your Spencer and raise you a Chesterton.

The philosophical case against miracles is somewhat easily dealt with. There is no philosophical case against miracles. There are such things as the laws of Nature rationally speaking. What everybody knows is this only. That there is repetition in nature. What everybody knows is that pumpkins produce pumpkins. What nobody knows is why they should not produce elephants and giraffes.

There is one philosophical question about miracles and only one. Many able modern Rationalists cannot apparently even get it into their heads. The poorest lad at Oxford in the Middle Ages would have understood it. (Note: as the last sentence will seem strange in our "enlightened" age I may explain that under "the cruel reign of mediaeval superstition," poor lads were educated at Oxford to a most reckless extent. Thank God, we live in better days.)

The question of miracles is merely this. Do you know why a pumpkin goes on being a pumpkin? If you do not, you cannot possibly tell whether a pumpkin could turn into a coach or couldn't. That is all.

All the other scientific expressions you are in the habit of using at breakfast are words and winds. You say "It is a law of nature that pumpkins should remain pumpkins." That only means that pumpkins generally do remain pumpkins, which is obvious; it does not say why. You say "Experience is against it." That only means, "I have known many pumpkins intimately and none of them turned into coaches."


Now, perhaps in Chesterton's day, pumpkins were simply "orange boxes." Everyone knew what pumpkins did--they made other pumpkins--but no one then really knew anything about the intricate inner workings of pumpkins.

Now, had Chesterton but displayed a bit of patience and realized that the natural sciences must, by nature, grope their way along, he would have understood how precarious a position it is to rise and exclaim, "Science cannot explain this, therefore it is a miracle!"

Today we know better.

We've taken our science inside the pumpkin and have even decoded the pumpkin genome. The first step in our progress was the discovery of pumpkin seeds. Through repeated experiments, it was determined that pumpkin seeds replicate themselves, and the pumpkin itself might actually be viewed as a kind of vehicle, of instrumental value, in this replication process.

But some asked, "Why is it that pumpkin seeds only produce other pumpkin seeds? Why not turnips or jays or bishops?" Chesterton's doubts began to reassert themselves among the scientific unbelievers.

Several decades later, the pepon helix was discovered. You see, pumpkin helices are programmed to replicate themselves in the form of other pumpkin helices....

I think Chesterton's point was that, in principle, there is a place where the correct answer to the question, "Why is it that every time this happens, that happens?" is "It just does." At that point, "It just does" is not a substitute for want of further data or theorizing. It is not an indication of the inadequacy of our theories. It is that the most elegant possible Theory of Everything, That Theory Than Which None More Complete Can Be Conceived, must posit brute facts or brute relations. Perhaps we’ll say, “When the strings jiggle, as they, in fact, do, then we get the present set C of cosmological constants. (Some venture that, counterfactually, were they to jaggle, then those constants would be significantly different.”)

To the question, “Why do we get set C as the result of jiggling?” the answer—the complete naturalistic answer—is “We just do.”

To the question, “But why do the strings jiggle?” the answer—the final answer—is “They just do.”

And, of course, why are there strings in the first place?

Perhaps we'll never get there. Perhaps we have plenty to occupy us, always ascending to higher and higher levels like a Super-Duper Mario game that we are still playing when our sun goes nova.

But there is a possible world in which the final level is mounted, or, to change the metaphor, in which scientific explanation is at its tether.

To challenge this would be to suppose that a Theory of Everything is necessarily elusive, because however dizzying the heights to which we have ascended, there are always higher peaks above.

So, if a T.O.E. is, in principle, achievable, then, in principle, we may find ourselves in a position such that: we know that there exist certain law like causal relations, and, necessarily, they defy scientific explanation.

At that level, the naturalist must be satisifed with "It just does." The theist might venture, "Because God willed it."

The naturalist's brute answer is no more an explanation than is the theist's, and is perhaps less. The theist's answer is no less coherent.



-MDL

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed reading your paper, Mark. I've read quite a few of your pieces on moral theory and I'm in agreement on pretty much all of it, including this piece.

The basic point which some of the interlocutors here are failing to notice is that what theism can provide and Darwinism cannot is the appropriate "little story".

Can the reliability of our moral hunches be explained in naturalist terms? Mark argues that it can't, and that on theistic assumptions such things can be explained.

I think Mark is right about this. Undirected evolution could only bring us into contact with moral facts if a reliable awareness of such facts helps us survive and/or reproduce. It really isn't clear how such awareness would give any reproductive advantage (unless those moral facts are construed as being in some way related to reproductive advantage ... but then you'll need a evolutionary ethic and I'm not convinced that's going to work out).

Richard Joyce, one of my PhD supervisors, has argued this line from an atheistic perspective and ended up with error theory. I've mentioned him here on DI before, I think, but still haven't got round to the reading.

I'm a little concerned about the passage on pages 17-8 where you write:

"But which is more plausible, given the Darwinian account: (a) we sense a deep obligation to care for our
children because this basic instinct confers reproductive fitness (irrespective of the
question of truth), or (b) the instinct is fitness-conferring because the resulting belief is
true? Darwin’s theory suggests the former."

Surely the moral-realist-naturalist will want to say that the two choices aren't mutually exclusive, and that both explanations could be true. I can't see my way to (b) myself, but isn't this the likely response?

Steve

P.S. I've always loved those quotes from Chesterton on miracles.

Anonymous said...

Steve,

As a couple of journal readers made more than clear, my paper needs more work.

I want to stand behind the choice that I present (the (a) and (b) that you question). It is essentially the same point that Street makes (though I read an earlier version of my paper to the BSPR in Oxford, Sept. '05, and so arrived at the same conclusion independently.)

Street does a much better job of arguing for the implausibility of (b) on evolutionary naturalism. If you've not read her paper, you should. It's quite good.

While you're at it, if you've not read Sommers and Rosenberg, Darwin's Nihilistic Idea, in which they argue that Darwinism "underwrites nihilism, it's really worthwhile.

Meanwhile, I'm still chipping away, trying to put this paper into better shape.

-MDL

Anonymous said...

Steve,

Drop me a line at linville@bellsouth.net

MDL

Anonymous said...

”I think Chesterton's point was that, in principle, there is a place where the correct answer to the question, "Why is it that every time this happens, that happens?" is "It just does." At that point, "It just does" is not a substitute for want of further data or theorizing. It is not an indication of the inadequacy of our theories. It is that the most elegant possible Theory of Everything, That Theory Than Which None More Complete Can Be Conceived, must posit brute facts or brute relations.”

Perhaps there is an in-principle single complete description of everything consisting of brute facts and relations; or perhaps what I hear from some anti-realists or pluralists is right, and there are only ever context-dependent answers to why-questions. I have no firm views on this either way. But one thing I’m rather sure of is that any two theories which elect to throw up their hands and exclaim “it just does” at exactly the same point are on equivalent footing in that regard. If you’re just going to say “it’s a brute fact”, that makes it a wash when the same arbitrary stopping point is available to any rival theory.

So, if a T.O.E. is, in principle, achievable, then, in principle, we may find ourselves in a position such that: we know that there exist certain law like causal relations, and, necessarily, they defy scientific explanation.

At that level, the naturalist must be satisifed with "It just does." The theist might venture, "Because God willed it."

The naturalist's brute answer is no more an explanation than is the theist's, and is perhaps less. The theist's answer is no less coherent.


If we’re only talking about “coherence”, then “it’s true because some entity capable of willing it willed it” is on the same footing as “it’s true because 12 beings capable of willing it willed it”, or 17, or etc. Now instead of a gap to shove Yahweh in, you’re looking for somewhere to arbitrarily bolt him on to in a way that does no actual explanatory work in the model.

I’ve reread your paper a little more closely, and there you clearly did try to make the bold assertion that Yahweh explains something better than some other theory. (For example, “The theist can provide a much more plausible reckoning of our moral beliefs”; ”it follows that there is a causal and explanatory connection between facts of excellence and beliefs that we may regard as justified about excellence.”) But you don’t actually present any such explanation in your paper, and when I pressed you for any amount of detail (admittedly in a somewhat flippant tone, but with a serious intent), the two response strategies were to either say that the mechanism by which Yahweh imparts moral knowledge were a brute unexplained fact within your theory, or an arbitrary and otiose bolt-on to its exterior.

Keep in mind again that none of this is intended as a defense of naturalist moral realism. From where I sit there simply are no such things as robustly realist moral facts. I see one group of people speculating on how queer-but-natural moral properties might come to be known, and falling flat on their faces, and another group saying that not only do these queer properties exist, but they are utterly unlike any natural property, and not only are they utterly unlike any natural property, but there exists another uncharacterized, unexplained, and unobservable supernatural entity that no one has ever observed which mysteriously brings these properties about, and furthermore there is another uncharacterized, unexplained, and unobservable mechanism by means of which he causally interferes with the structure of our brains to impart this knowledge. I think you would be better served to simply drop the claim that you’re actually putting forth any explanatory theory at all.

Anonymous said...

Well, I confess to a bit of flippancy in that last reply. As a result, I seem to have been misunderstood.

The Chesterton quote and my commentary were not offered in the stead of a considered view of moral epistemology or any bit of natural theology. Rather, it was to counter your apparent view (seen in part in your endorsement of the Spencer quote) that either one has a naturalistic explanation or no explanation at all.

I think the correct answer to the question of why I am replying in this final installment is "Because I want to." I think there are good teleological explanations that resist reduction to mechanistic explanations. I take it that you would be unhappy with this, as you would, I suspect, suppose mechanistic explanations to be more basic than teleological explanations.

But, short of a prior commitment to naturalism, why should anyone suppose this to be the case?

The Spencer quote reminds me of a quip by Michael Shermer when on the panel for The Question of God. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus--the literal quickening of his dead body and the reversal of the processes that had set in--is manifestly absurd when one begins to ask specific questions about how God accomplished the deed. (It was this Spencer-Shermer connection that was responsible for the GKC quote occurring.) Shermer asks questions about just how God interacts with the corpuscles and such in the body. The believer is cornered in that if he takes the bait and actually attempts an answer, the result comes off sounding patently absurd.

But I don't know.

Genesis says that God caused a deep sleep to come over Adam. While Adam was anesthetized, God removed his rib and, from that rib, formed the woman, Eve.

Suppose you're there. You're chatting with Adam when he yawns, stretches and lies down for a nap. Incredible as it seems, right before your eyes, the flesh over his rib cage parts. A rib seems to work its way loose and slides to the ground. As you move in more closely to see what is happening, you hear a distinctly audible voice: "Would you move? You're in my light." No one appears to be there. The wound in Adam's flesh closes over so that no marks are visible. You step back and watch the rib grow in all directions. The growing sections gradually take the form of a woman lying in the place where the rib had lain. She blinks and sits up, staring at you and Adam, who also now is coming around. The audible voice is heard once more, "Adam, I have created this woman to be your companion. Sorry, but I had to borrow a rib."

Is one really in a sort of explanatory pickle in such a situation? First, is it at all clear that the most rational reaction would be to seek out some natural and mechanistic explanation for what was just witnessed? The greatest temptation to think so would come from that same prior commitment to naturalism, along with the assumption that all good explanation is "scientific." If, on the other hand, one is tempted to say, "Surely this is the finger of God," has one thus turned to a vacuous, non-explanation? If you paid enough attention to what was actually taking place, your account of "how God did it" might well involve his interacting with corpuscles and cartilage. What is absurd about that? Further, when you find yourself at an utter loss to explain precisely how God managed to accomplish the task, does this in any way undermine your confidence that you have just witnessed a miracle?

Anyway, generally, I see Spencer and you doing little more than rattling naturalistic swords.

Moral epistemology?

In a nutshell, I would suggest that the best theory here will follow the lead of the best general theory in epistemology. I am attracted to an essentially Reidian externalist view. Reid's reply to the cartesian tradition (and Hume), was that certain of our beliefs are had spontaneously and non-inferentially, and that this is as it should be. "I have a head" is warranted for me neither as the result of a bit of deductive reasoning, nor as the conclusion of some probabilistic argument. (If it seems to me that I have a head, then, probably I have a head; It seems to me that I have a head....) Rather, it is one of those beliefs that comes as standard equipment--a part of our constitution--in all properly functioning rational agents (with heads).

Standard fare in moral epistemology involves appeal to something like Reflective Equilibrium. This is normally associated with a coherentist epistemology, but something very much like it is, I think, available to the Reidian foundationalist. We begin with some fund of considered moral beliefs, and theorizing takes off from there.

The question arises as to whether we should suppose that those processes responsible for our considered beliefs are linked appropriately to their purported truth conditions.

My suggestion--what I do little more than allude to in the paper you've read--is that the theist has a story to tell about the human constitution. Human moral faculties are designed to detect moral properties, so that, for instance, a properly functioning moral conscience will produce the experience of guilt or obligation just in case one is guilty or obligated. As Street has argued so eloquently, Darwinism (I would add naturalistic Darwinism) provides no plausible link between belief-producing mechanisms and the sort of moral truth that is required for the value realist.

Perhaps the design of that constitution involves stories about ribs, cartilage and corpuscles. I don't know.

But I do think that a background belief that human moral faculties are truth-aimed is an important component in an overall view that seeks to show that the resulting beliefs are warranted (just as those who reply to Plantinga's EAAN aim to show that our the mechanisms responsible for our ordinary environmental beliefs woulod be truth-aimed on Darwinism).

And the theist is in a position to tell the kind of story that seems unavailable to the naturalist.

The last word is yours.

MDL

Anonymous said...

The 1 verse in Psalms you are referring to is regarding the sons of Edom (apostates) and serving those people in the same way they served the Hebrews. You would know that if you had read the entire section. Which by the way only consists of 9 short verses. It doesn't take a genius to see that. It's quite clear. This comes from the KJV.
As a person who was strangled by her father and shaken while it was happening, I am here to tell you there ARE NO
JUSTIFIABLE GROUNDS for doing this. My older sister who he abandoned went through the same thing. We are 8 years apart, so it can happen regardless of the age of the offender. Stop with the theories Mark. Seems like what you don't know might be a more appropriate topic for you to write about.