Earlier this evening I was watching Tucker Carlson. He had a psychology professor on whose YouTube videos had been blocked by Google but then later unblocked. His name is Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto. I had never heard of him, and his performance on Carlson's show was not particularly impressive. Having viewed his The Problem with Atheism, however, I am now impressed!
My finding of this video is serendipitous in that it ties in with a discussion I was having yesterday with Malcolm Pollack. Malcolm is a naturalist and atheist in the Dennett-Dawkins-Harris camp. He seems to think that an objective, agreed-upon, and life-enhancing morality has no need of a transcendent foundation, and perhaps also that there is no need that the majority believe in any such transcendent foundation. In an earlier thread Malcolm wrote:
. . . one can accept the principle of equality before the law, based on a fundamental sense of shared humanity and liberty, merely as a stipulation, a premise one accepts because one thinks it leads to a just society, without belief in a transcendent foundation in God. It is simply a choice that a person, or a society, can make; we do that with all sorts of other premises and conventions.
I replied:
Can someone who emphasizes the biologically-based differences between groups and sees cultural differences percolating up out of those differences [justifiably] appeal to a "sense of shared humanity" sufficiently robust to support equality before the law?
It may be that the West is running on fumes, the last vapors of the Judeo-Christian worldview and that your sense of equal justice for all is but a vestige of that dying worldview. Can belief in that moral code survive when belief in a transcendent Ground thereof is lost? The death of God has consequences, as Nietzsche appreciated.
This is the question that Professor Peterson addresses with passion and skill and with a slam or two at Sam Harris. (3:03) Peterson's point is essentially the one that Nietzsche made: belief in and respect for the authority of Christian morality stands and falls with belief in the Christian God. The death of God-belief in the West among the educated classes leads inevitably to moral nihilism.
Malcolm thinks we needn't drag the Transcendent into it; we can just agree on some set of moral conventions that will guide us. Sounds utopian to me. We don't agree on anything anymore: so how can we agree on this? Because it would be the rational thing to do to insure human flourishing?
But why should one care about the flourishing of anyone outside of oneself and one's tribe? Peterson raises the question of why it would be irrational, say, to exploit others for one's use and enjoyment. Why is it irrational for the strong to enslave the weak? How is pure naked self-interest irrational, Peterson asks. (3:53)
A curious new abortion argument by Princeton's Elizabeth Harman is making the rounds. (A tip of the hat to Malcolm Pollack for bringing it to my attention.) It is not clear just what Harman's argument is, but it looks to be something along the following lines:
1) "Among early fetuses there are two very different kinds of beings . . . ."
2) One kind of early fetus has "moral status."
3) The other kind of early fetus does not have "moral status."
4) The fetuses possessing moral status have it in virtue of their futures, in virtue of the fact that they are the beginning stages of future persons.
5) The fetuses lacking moral status lack it in virtue of their not having futures, in virtue of their not being the beginning stages of future persons.
Therefore
6) If a fetus is prevented from having a future, either by miscarriage or abortion, then the fetus does not have moral status at the time of its miscarriage or abortion. "That's something that doesn't have a future as a person and it doesn't have moral status." (From 5)
7) If a fetus lacks moral status, then aborting it is not morally impermissible.
Therefore
8) " . . . there is nothing morally bad about early abortion."
Some will say that this argument is so bad that it is 'beneath refutation.' When a philosopher uses this phrase what he means is that an argument so tagged is so obviously defective as not to be worth refuting. There is also the concomitant suggestion that one who refutes that which is 'beneath refutation' is a foolish fellow, and perhaps even a (slightly) morally dubious character when the subject matter is moral inasmuch as he undermines the healthy conviction that certain ideas are so morally abhorrent that they shouldn't be discussed publicly at all lest the naive and uncritical be led astray.
But to quote my sparring partner London Ed, in a moment when the muse had him in her grip: "In philosophy there is a ‘quodlibet’ principle that you are absolutely free to discuss anything you like." That's right. The Quodlibet Principle is one of the defining rules of the philosophical 'game.' There is nothing, nothing at all, that may not be hauled before the bench of reason, there to be rudely interrogated. (And that, paradoxically, includes the Quodlibet Principle!)
I hereby invoke that noble and indeed Socratic principle in justification of my attention to Harman's argument.
What's wrong with it? She is maintaining in effect that the moral status of a biological individual depends on how long it lasts. Accordingly, moral status is not intrinsic to the early fetus but depends on some contingent future development that may or may not occur. So the early fetus that developed into Elizabeth Harman has moral status at every time in its development, because it developed into what we all recognize as a person and rights-possessor, while an aborted early fetus has moral status at no time in its development because it will not develop into a person and rights-possessor.
This issues in the absurd consequence that one can morally justify an abortion just by having one. For if you kill your fetus (or have your fetus killed), then you guarantee that it has no future. If it has no future, then it has no moral status. And if it has no moral status, then killing it is not morally impermissible, and is therefore morally justified.
Is it ever morally right and reasonable to question or impugn motives or character in a debate?
I have just demolished Harman's argument. She has given no good reasons for her thesis. Quite the contrary. She has presented perhaps the most lame abortion argument ever made public. But what really interests me is the bolded question. And I mean it in general. It is not about Harman except per accidens.
Is it ever morally right and reasonable in a debate to question motives and character? I didn't get a straight answer from London Ed in an earlier discussion. So I press him again.
We agree, of course, that arguments stand and fall on their own merits in sublime independence of their producers and consumers. I have hammered on this theme dozens of times in these pages. One may not substitute motive imputation and character analysis for argument evaluation.
But once I have refuted an argument or series of arguments, am I not perfectly morally justified in calling into the question the motives and character of the producers of those arguments? I say yes.
I have a theory about what really drives the innumerable bad pro-abortion/pro-choice arguments abroad in this decadent culture, but I leave that theory for later. Here I pose the bolded question quite generally and apart from the abortion question.
Andrew Sullivan is down with a very bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But he hasn't lost his mind entirely. He is hip to the absurdity of leftist talk about cultural appropriation. After wading through yet another load of his anti-Trump hyperventilatory hysteria, I came upon these reasonable words of his:
I love the phrase “long-debunked universalism” by the way. Debunked by whom? Universalism — the idea that human beings can exist as individuals, rather than as members of assigned groups — is far from debunked. It is, in fact, one core premise of liberal society.
Sully is right, but it is not easy to state clearly what is at issue here or what it even means to "exist as individuals rather than as members of assigned groups." A while back I was complaining about tribalism and I was saying things like: we need to get beyond tribal and racial and other particularistic self-identifications; we need to learn to see ourselves and others as individuals and not as tokens of types or members of groups. To my surprise, certain alt-righties disagreed with me, seeming to say that what we need to oppose black tribalism, say, is not a transcendence of tribalism, but an equal but opposite white tribalism.
Now that makes no sense to me, except as a sort of interim or stop-gap defensive measure. If some black dude gets in my face about the how great it is to be black, I will be tempted to get in his face and reply in kind.
But that sort of thing does not comport well with my irenic, philosophical nature. We need to transcend our tribalisms and learn to respect each other as persons with equal rights. We are equal as persons!
But what could that mean? Is it not just empty talk? It sounds like the pious verbiage of a preacher or a politician who doesn't really believe what he is saying but says it because he is paid to do so.
Talk of equal rights and respect for persons is indeed empty if naturalism is true. If we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal, then talk of equality is blather. For we are obviously not equal empirically either as individuals or as groups. The alt-righties and neo-reactionaries hammer on this point and they are correct in so doing. So normative equality cannot be grounded in empirical equality if for no other reason than that there is no empirical equality. On the other hand, normative equality cannot 'float in the air.' It cannot subsist independently of any basis in reality.
What then could possibly ground our normative equality as persons with equal rights to life, liberty, and property, if we are nothing but complex physical systems? If there is no equality in fact, how could there be in norm?
If naturalism is true, what could make it morally wrong always and everywhere and for everyone — not just pragmatically or prudentially inadvisable in particular circumstances — for one group to enslave another? Nothing that I can see. Not the ability to reason since, on naturalism, that is just an empirical feature of human organisms. In any case, the ability is not equally present in human animals. Hoe could a non-normative property, unequally distributed, ground a right to be tretaed with respect and never to be treated as a means only? If you say that all normal humans have the ability to reason to some degree or other, then you are abstracting away from our differences. How could that abstraction, which remains on the non-normative plane, ground a right to be treated equally?
Here is the problem expressed as an aporetic tetrad:
1) Humans are not empirically equal either as individuals or as groups.
2) Talk of the normative equality of persons, that each ought to be treated as an end and never merely as a means (Kant), is empty if it cannot be provided with a basis in concrete non-normative reality.
3) Naturalism is true: concrete reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents.
4) Persons are normatively equal.
The limbs of the tetrad are inconsistent; something has to give. (1) is non-negotiably true as a matter of plain fact. (2) is extremely plausible, and we are committed to (4) if, as our moral intuitions instruct us, slavery, sex trafficking, and the like are moral abominations. So I reject (3).
If (3) is false, then it is possible that theism is true. If all finite persons are creatures of one and the same infinite person, then all persons are metaphysically equal. This metaphysical fact is then the non-normative basis that grounds the normative equality of persons.
Question for atheists: If you hold that slavery is morally wrong, what on your view makes it morally wrong?
If one assumes life has a negative value, or at the very least is a problem that needs solving, then surely it would follow that antinatalism is the prudential course. If we are unable to discern a meaning or a solution to life, then there can hardly be any justification for dragging someone else into said dilemma kicking and screaming (literally), while we attempt to work out our own salvation or lack thereof. That's why I subscribe to a form of prudential antinatalism. This differs from the kind that says life is and always a negative thing, as for all I know there could be a pay-off at the end of it currently indiscernible to humans, but for want of indisputable proof then I cannot see any reason to expose someone else to the dilemma of life, or at least I personally cannot do it, given I cannot find any ultimate meaning or justification for my own existence, at this present time at least.
This entry will attempt to articulate and develop Mr. White's suggestion.
What do we know? We do not know whether human life has an overall positive or negative value. It could have a positive value despite appearances to the contrary. For example, it could be that after our sojourn through this vale of tears, the veil of ignorance will be lifted and we will find ourselves in a realm of peace and light in which every tear is dried and the sense of things is revealed. It could be that the vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making in which some of us 'earn our wings.' But this is an article of faith, not of knowledge. We don't know whether there are further facts, hidden from us at present, in whose light the world as we experience it here and now will come to be seen as overall good.
What we do know is that the problem of the value of human existence is a genuine problem and thus one that needs solving. It needs solving presumably because it is not merely a theoretical problem in axiology but a problem with implications for practical ethics. In particular: Is procreation morally permissible or not?
But does it follow from what we know that anti-natalism is the prudential course? Karl answers in the affirmative. I don't know whether Karl is an extreme or a moderate anti-natalist, but I don't think it matters for the present discussion. Extreme anti-natalism is the view espoused by David Benatar according to which "it would be better if there were no more humans" (David Benatar and David Wasserman, Debating Procreation, Oxford UP 2015, 13) from which axiological thesis there follows the deontic conclusion that "all procreation is wrong." (12) A moderate anti-natalist could hold that most procreation is wrong.
One assumption that Karl seems to be making is that, absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative. This assumption I find very plausible. But note that it rests on a still deeper assumption, namely, that the value of life can be objectively assessed or evaluated. This assumption is not obviously correct, but it too is plausible. Here, then, is the argument. It is a kind of 'moral safety' argument. To be on the morally safe side, we ought not procreate.
Argument for Prudential Anti-Natalism
1) There is an objective 'fact of the matter' as to whether or not human life is on balance of positive or negative value.
2) Absent any redemption 'from above,' the value of life for most humans is on balance negative, that is, the harms of existence outweigh the benefits of existence.
3) We do not know that the value of life for most humans is not on balance negative, i.e., that the harms of existence are compensated by the benefits of existence.
4) We do know that bringing children into the world will expose them to physical, mental, and spiritual suffering, and that all of those so exposed will also actually suffer the harms of existence.
5) It is morally wrong to subject people to harms when it is not known that the harms will be compensated by a greater good.
6) To have children is to subject them to such harms. Therefore:
7) It is morally wrong to procreate.
Now you have heard me say that there are no compelling arguments in philosophy, and this is certainly no exception. I'll mention two possible lines of rebuttal.
a) Reject premise (1) along Nietzschean lines as explained in my most recent Nietzsche post. It might be urged that any negative judgment on the value of life merely reflects the lack of vitality of the one rendering the judgment. No healthy specimen takes suffering as an argument against against living and procreating! I do not endorse this view, but I feel its pull. Related: Nietzsche and National Socialism.
b) Reject (3). There are those who, standing fast in their faith, would claim to know by a sort of cognitio fidei that children and life itself are divine gifts, and that in the end all the horrors and injustices of this life will be made good.
This entry assumes familiarity with the story recounted by Shusaku Endo in his novel, Silence. Philip L. Quinn's "Tragic Dilemmas, Suffering Love, and Christian Life" (The Journal of Religious Ethics, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 1989, 151-183) is the best discussion of the central themes of the novel I have read. I thank Vlastimil Vohanka for bringing Quinn's article to my attention.
Quinn argues powerfully and plausibly that Rodrigues is "trapped in an ethical dilemma." (171) I will suggest, however, that while the dilemma is genuine, it cannot be ethical. Let us first hear what Quinn has to say:
When Rodrigues tramples on the fumie [image of Christ] what he does, I think, is both to violate a demand of his religious vocation binding on him no matter what the consequences and to satisfy an equally pressing demand for an expression of love of neighbor. The case resists subsumption under one but not the other of these descriptions. Both demands are characteristic of distinctively Christian ethic. They spring from a single source: the commandment that we both love God with total devotion and love our neighbor as ourselves. The misfortune is that Rodrigues cannot, given that he is the kind of person his life has made him, satisfy one of these demands without violating the other. He is, I suggest, trapped in an ethical dilemma. (170-171)
Quinn then proceeds to explain what an ethical dilemma is:
There is an ethical dilemma when a person is subject to two ethical demands such that he cannot satisfy both and neither demand is overridden or nullified. [. . .] Demands that are neither overridden nor nullified are in force. When one confronts two conflicting ethical demands both of which are in force, one is caught in an ethical dilemma. It seems to be that this is the situation of Sebastian Rodrigues.
I will now attempt to set forth the problem as clearly as I can.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength;
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)
B. Both demands are morally obligatory because they are divinely commanded.
C. Both are equally obligatory: neither takes precedence over the other.
D. Neither demand can be overridden and neither can be nullified.
E. An exterior act of apostasy such as trampling on the fumie even without a corresponding interior act of apostasy counts as a violation of the first commandment.
F. Failing to engage in a simple exterior act such as trampling on the fumie that will save many from prolonged torture and death is a violation of the second commandment. Therefore:
G. Rodrigues faces a dilemma: he must satisfy both demands, but he cannot satisfy both demands.
But is this dilemma an ethical dilemma? Arguably not.
H. Ought implies Can: If one ought to do x, i.e., if one is morally obliged to do x, then it must be possible that one do x. Contrapositively, if it is not possible that one do x, then one is not morally obliged to do x.
I. It is not possible that Rodrigues satisfy both demands in the terrible situation in which he finds himself. Therefore:
J. Rodrigues is not morally obliged to satisfy both demands in the situation in which he finds himself. This is not to say that, in general, a Christian is not morally obliged to satisfy both demands; it is is to say that a person in the situation in which Rodrigues find himself is under no moral obligation to satisfy both.
At best he is in an awful psychological bind. The dilemma is psychological, not ethical. Quinn may be committing a non sequitur when we writes (emphasis added),
The misfortune is that Rodrigues cannot, given that he is the kind of person his life has made him, satisfy one of these demands without violating the other. He is, I suggest, trapped in an ethical dilemma.
From the fact that R. is deeply psychologically conflicted due to the circumstances he is in and the kind of person his life has made him, it does not follow that he is in an ethical dilemma. He cannot be morally obliged to do what it is impossible for him to do. So:
K. Rodriguez is not "trapped in an ethical dilemma."
L. We should also note that if Rodrigues does face an ethical dilemma, then this would seem to show that there is something deeply incoherent about Christian ethics. This would not follow if the dilemma is merely psychological.
M. So what should Rodrigues do? Exactly what he is depicted as doing in the novel. I can think of two reasons that justify trampling upon the fumie and saving the prisoners from torture.
The first is that his apostasy is merely external, not in his heart, and therefore arguably not apostasy at all in the precise circumstances in which he finds himself. So (E) above, even if true in general cannot be true for R. in the circumstances.
The second is that, given the silence of God, it is much better known (or far more reasonably believed) that the prisoners should be spared from unspeakable torture by a mere foot movement than that God exists and that Rodrigues' exterior act of apostasy would be an offence God as opposed to a mere betrayal by Rodrigues of who he is and has become by his life choices.
That the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine. I am sensitive to its moral force. I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature as the types of actions they are, wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances. But what would have been the likely upshot had the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in World War II? Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us. But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens.
If I understand the Catholic doctrine, it implies that if Harry Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age for two centuries — he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, if the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done. This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish." Although I invoked an historical example, nothing hinges on it since a matter of principle is at stake.
This extreme anti-consequentialism troubles me if it is thought to be relevant to how states ought to conduct themselves. Suppose that there is no God and no soul and no post-mortem existence, and thus that this life is all there is. Suppose the political authorities let the entire world be destroyed out of a refusal to target and kill innocent civilians of a rogue state. This would amount to the sacrificing of humanity to an abstract absolutist moral principle. This would be moral insanity.
On the other hand, extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true. If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant. If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant. For the soul to be saved, it must be kept free from, or absolved of, every moral stain in which case it can never be right to do evil in pursuit of good. Now the deliberate killing of innocent human beings is evil and so must never be done — regardless of consequences. On a Christian moral scheme, morality is not in the service of our animal life here below; we stand under an absolute moral demand that calls us from beyond this earthly life and speaks to our immortal souls, not to our mortal bodies. Christianity is here consonant with the great Socratic thought that it is better to suffer evil, wrong, injustice than to to do them. (Plato, Gorgias, 469a)
But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics. No problem with that — if the metaphysics is true. For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know that the metaphysics is true? Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism.
I am not claiming that classical theism false. I myself believe it to be true. My point is that we know that this world is no illusion and is at least relatively real, together with its goods, but we merely believe that God and the soul are real.
If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that in certain circumstances the deliberate targeting of the innocent is justified?
An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered. But a leader of a nation is in a much different position. Even if the leader qua private citizen holds to an absolutist position according to which some actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong regardless of consequences, he would not be justified in acting in his official capacity as head of state from this absolutist position. The reason is that he cannot reasonably claim that the metaphysics on which his moral absolutism rests is correct. God may or may not exist — we don't know. But that this world exists we do know. And in this world no action is such that consequences are irrelevant to its moral evaluation. By 'in this world' I mean: according to the prudential wisdom of this world. Is adultery, for example, intrinsically wrong such that no conceivable circumstances or consequences could justify it? A worldly wise person who is in general opposed to adultery will say that there are conceivable situations in which a married woman seduces a man to discover military secrets that could save thousands of lives, and is justified in so doing.
Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me. Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her moral rigorism remains tenable.
We confront a moral dilemma. On the one hand, a head of state may sometimes justifiably act in the interests of the citizens of the state of which he is the head by commanding actions which are intrinsically wrong. On the other hand, no one may ever justifiably do or command anything that is intrinsically wrong.
Of course the dilemma or aporetic dyad can be 'solved' by denying one of the limbs; but there is no solution which is a good solution. Or so say I. On my metaphilosophy, the problems of philosophy are almost all of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but none of them soluble. The above dilemma is an example of a problem that is genuine, important, and insoluble.
Torture
Patrick Toner holds that waterboarding is torture. I incline to say that it isn't. But let's assume I am wrong. Presumably, most who hold that waterboarding is torture will also hold that torture is intrinsically wrong. But how could it be wrong for the political authorities to torture a jihadi who knows the locations and detonation times of suitcase nukes planted in Manhattan? Here again is our moral dilemma. I suspect Toner would not 'solve' it by adopting consequentialism. I suspect he holds that torture is wrong always and everywhere and under any conceivable circumstances. But then he is prepared to sacrifice thousands of human lives to an abstract moral principle, or else is invoking a theological metaphysics that is far less grounded than the prudence of worldly wisdom. I would like to hear Toner's response to this.
Some have tried to solve the dilemma by invoking the Doctrine of Double Effect. But I am pretty sure Patrick will not go that route.
Ayn Rand has some interesting things to say about the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in her essay, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” (1960) in Philosophy: Who Needs It (Signet, 1982, ed. Peikoff, pp. 58-76). Here is one example:
He [Kant] did not deny the validity of reason – he merely claimed that reason is “limited,” that it leads us to impossible contradictions [as opposed to possible contradictions?], that everything we perceive is an illusion and that we can never perceive reality or “things as they are.” He claimed,in effect, that the things we perceive are not real because we perceive them. (p. 64, italics in original)
Although the quotation is suggestive of Kant's views, anyone who really knows Kant knows that this is a travesty of Kant’s actual views. It is either a willful distortion, or a distortion based on ignorance of Kant’s texts. First of all, notice how Rand runs together three separate ideas in one and the same sentence, the first sentence quoted. We ought to distinguish the following Kantian claims.
K1: Reason is limited in its cognitive employment to the sense world: there is no knowledge by reason alone of meta-physical objects, objects lying beyond the bounds of sense, such as God and the soul.
K2: When reason is employed without sensory guidance or sensory input in an attempt to know meta-physical objects, reason entangles itself in contradictions.
K3: For knowledge, two things are required: sensory input and conceptual interpretation. Since the interpretation is made in accordance with categories grounded in our understanding, the object of knowledge is a phenomenon rather than a noumenon (thing-in-itself). Since phenomena are objects of objectively valid cognition, a phenomenon (Erscheinung) is distinct from an illusion (Schein). (Cf. Critique of Pure Reason B69-70 et passim)
This is a quick but accurate summary of central Kantian theses. The question before us is not whether they are true, or even whether they are reasonably maintained; the question is solely whether Rand has fairly presented them. Comparing this summary with what Rand says, one can see how she distorts Kant’s views. Not only does Rand misrepresent K1, K2, and K3, she conflates them in her run-on sentence although they are obviously distinct. Particularly outrageous is Rand’s claim that for Kant, objects of perception are illusory, given Kant’s quite explicit explanations (in several places) of the distinction between appearance and illusion.
More importantly, Rand gives no evidence of understanding the problem with which Kant is grappling, namely, that of securing objective knowledge of nature in the teeth of Humean scepticism. One cannot evaluate a philosopher’s theses except against the backdrop of the problems those theses are supposed to solve. The very sense of the theses emerges only in the context of the problems, arguments, and considerations with which the philosopher is grappling.
To give you some idea of the pitiful level Rand operates from, consider her suggestion near the bottom of the same page that logical positivists are “neo-mystics.” Old Carnap must be turning over in his grave.
On p. 65, we find another slam at Kant, this time against his ethics:
What Kant propounded was full, total, abject selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no benefit from it of any kind, neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your action is not moral any longer. This is the ultimate form of demanding that man turn himself into a 'shmoo' — the mystic little animal of the L'l Abner comic strip, that went around seeking to be eaten by somebody. (Italics in original.)
This too is a travesty of Kant’s actual position. To appreciate this, we need to draw some distinctions. Kant distinguishes duty and inclination. (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Akademie-Ausgabe 397 ff.) This distinction must be made since there are acts one is inclined to perform that may or may not be in accordance with duty, and there are acts one ought to perform which one is definitely not inclined to perform. An inclination to behave cruelly contravenes one’s duty, while an inclination to behave in a kind manner is in accordance with it.
Kant also distinguishes between acting from duty and acting in accordance with duty. One acts from duty if one’s act is motivated by one’s concern to do one’s duty. Clearly, if one acts from duty, then one acts in accordance with duty. But the converse does not hold: one can act in accordance with duty without acting from duty. Suppose Ron is naturally inclined to be kind to everyone he meets. On a given occasion, his kind treatment of a person is motivated not by duty but by inclination. In this case, Ron acts in accordance with duty but not from duty.
There are thus two distinctions and they cut perpendicular to each other. There is the distinction between duty and inclination, and there is the distinction between acting from and acting in accordance with duty/inclination. This makes for four possible combinations: acting from duty and in accordance with inclination; acting from duty and contrary to inclination; acting from inclination and contrary to duty; acting contrary to both inclination and duty.
Kant held that an act has moral worth only if it is done from duty. Contra Rand, however, this is obviously consistent with acting in accordance with inclination and deriving benefit from the act. Suppose — to adapt one of Kant’s examples — I am a merchant who is in a position to cheat a customer (a child, say). Acting from duty, I treat the customer fairly. My act has moral worth even though I derive benefits from acting fairly and being perceived as acting fairly: cheating customers is not good for business in the long run. I may also enjoy reflecting on my probity.
One can see from this how confused Rand is. She thinks that an act performed from duty is equivalent to one that runs counter to inclination, or counter to one’s own benefit. But nowhere does Kant say this, and nothing he does say implies it. An act done from duty may or may not run counter to inclination. Either way, the act has moral worth. If Jack and Jill are married (to each other!) and Jill asks Jack for sex, then Jack has a duty to engage in the act with Jill. Presumably, Jack will be strongly inclined by his animal nature to engage in the act. But if he acts from duty, then the act has moral worth despite the natural inclination. The difficulty of determining whether or not Jack acts from duty or from inclination is not to the point.
Again, the question is not whether Kant's ethical doctrine is true or reasonably maintained; the question is simply whether Rand has fairly presented it. The answer to that is in the negative.
So I persist in my view that Rand is a hack, and that this is part of the explanation of why many professional philosophers accord her little respect.
That being said, I'll take Rand over a leftist any day.
The book arrived yesterday via Amazon and I began reading it this morning. Looks good!
Oxford University Press, 2001. Foot essays "a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti-naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of Moore's original thought." (p. 5)
This is another one or those questions that never goes away and about which reams of rubbish have been written.
In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes:
If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39)
Harris then goes on to point out something that I don't doubt is true, namely, that atheists ". . . are at least as well behaved as the general population." (Ibid.) Harris' enthymeme can be spelled out as an instance of modus tollendo tollens, if you will forgive the pedantry:
1. If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.
2. Atheists are not less moral than believers.
Therefore
3. Religious faith does not offer the only real basis for morality.
The problem with this argument lies in its first premise. It simply doesn't follow that if religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than theists. This blatant non sequitur trades on a confusion of two questions which it is essential to distinguish.
Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more 'moral,' i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?
The answer to this question is No. But even if the answer is Yes, I am willing to concede arguendo to Harris that it is No. In any case (Q1) is not philosophically interesting, except as part of the run-up to a genuine philosophical question, though (Q1) is of interest sociologically. Now contrast (Q1) with
Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code?
The agreed-upon code is one that most or many atheists and theists would accept. Thus, don't we all object to child molestation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft, lying, and the swindling of investors by people like Bernard Madoff? And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the thief or murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done. Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc. Just imagine some minimal objectively binding code that all or most of us, theists and atheists alike, accept.
What (Q2) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything? For example, what justifies the shared judgment that the swindling of investors is morally wrong? Or rape, or wanton killing of people, or slavery?
There are different meta-ethical theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices. Here you can read the transcript of a debate between Richard Taylor and William Lane Craig on this topic. I incline toward the side ably defended by Craig. Although I respect Taylor very much as a philosopher and have learned from his work, he seems to me to come across in this debate as something of a sophist and a smart-ass.
But the point of this post is not to take sides on the question of the basis of morality, but simply to point out that Sam Harris has confused two quite obviously distinct questions. For if he had kept them distinct, he would have seen that the question whether morality requires a basis in religion is logically independent of the question whether theists are more moral than atheists. He would have seen that invoking the platitude that atheists can be as morally decent as theists has no tendency to show that morality does not require a supernatural foundation. He would have seen that (1) is false.
I should add, however, that while the two questions are distinct, they are related. For if people come to believe that there is no justification for the agreed-upon moral code, then they will be less likely to adhere to it. Or suppose a person thinks that the justification for the prohibition against rape is merely prudential: it is imprudent to rape women because you may get caught and go to prison. If that were the justification, then a man without a conscience who encounters a defenceless solitary woman in an isolated place would have no reason not to have his way with her. But if the man had the belief that the moral wrongness of rape is grounded in the holy will of an omniscient deity, then the man would have a reason to resist his inclination.
To be judgmental is to be hypercritical, captious, caviling, fault-finding, etc. One ought to avoid being judgmental. But it is a mistake to confuse making moral judgments with being judgmental. I condemn the behavior of Ponzi-schemers like Bernie Madoff. That is a moral judgment. (And if you refuse to condemn Madoff and his behavior, then I condemn your refusal to condemn.) But it would be an egregious misuse of language to say that I am being judgmental in issuing either condemnation.
If someone thinks it is wrong to make moral judgments, ask him whether he thinks it is morally wrong. If he says yes, then point out that he has just made a moral judgment; he has made the moral judgment that making moral judgments is morally wrong.
Then ask him whether (a) he is OK with contradicting himself, or (b) makes an exception for the meta-assertion that making moral judgments is morally wrong, or (c) thinks that both the meta-judgment and first-order moral judgments (e.g., sodomy is morally wrong) are all morally wrong. (C) is a logically consistent position, although rejectable for other reasons.
The interlocutor might of course say that 'must not' in 'must not be judgmental' is not to be construed morally, but in some other way. Press him on how it is to be construed.
I write about what interests me whether I am expert in it or not. Some find this unseemly; I do not. I oppose hyper-professionalization and excessive specialization. Every once in a while I post something that is mistaken, someone corrects me, and I learn something. I admit mistakes if mistakes they be.
Time to admit a mistake. Johannes Argentus comments and I respond (in blue):
"To get a feel for how there might (epistemic use of 'might') be a trumping or suspension of the moral/ethical, consider the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. This is an example of what could be called 'trumping from above.' On Dylan's telling, God said to Abraham: "Kill me a son!" But Isaac was innocent and in killing him Abraham would be violating God's own Fifth Commandment. Had Abraham slaughtered his son he could not have justified it in terms of the moral code of the Decalogue; nor can I imagine any consequentialist line of moral reasoning that could have justified it; but he could have justified it non-morally by saying that God commanded him to sacrifice his son and that he was obeying the divine command. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he is sovereign over the moral code as the source of its existence, its content and its obligatoriness. He is outside of it, not subject to it; it is rather subject to him and his omnipotent will. We are in the vicinity of something like Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" as conveyed in Fear and Trembling."
The key factor for a correct understanding of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac is the timing of the event with relation to God’s gradual revelation, and with relation to human reason’s gradual illumination and liberation, by God’s word, from the darkness into which it had fallen since the time of original sin.
According to the timing of the event with relation to God’s gradual revelation, there was no problem in God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son because it was centuries before He decreed the prohibition of human sacrifices in the Law given through Moses (Deut 18:10). Thus the command did not contradict any positive divine law known by Abraham.
BV: Excellent criticism. I mistakenly ignored the proper sequence of Biblical events. Contrary to what I suggested, God was not putting Abraham in a situation where he had a non-moral reason to override a known divine absolute moral command. Nevertheless, in commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac God was commanding an absolutely immoral act. The act-type — slaughtering an innocent human being — was no less ojectively immoral for being unknown to Abraham.
And according to the timing of the event with relation to human reason’s gradual liberation from darkness, there was no problem either because that process was just starting, and Abraham lived within a culture in which it was a common practice to sacrifice the firstborn son to the personal or local god. Thus the command did not contradict the clouded knowledge that Abraham had of natural law.
The command, then, was not a case of 'trumping from above' a rationally discovered or divinely revealed moral commandment, because Abraham was not aware of any such commandment forbidding the sacrifice of his firstborn, which in his cultural environment was a fairly common practice.
BV: Argentus is right.
Neither does the command necessarily show that God is arbitrarily sovereign over the moral code, which would be the case only if the event had taken place after the revelation of the Decalogue. Rather, the event is wholly dependent on Abraham's (and his contemporaries') state of ignorance regarding moral law and more broadly the meaning of life, which required the establishment of the only base on which the whole edifice could be built: absolute trust and obedience to Absolute Being.
Thus, the pedagogical and "that-time-only" nature of the event is fully consistent with the notion that moral law is inherent to human nature and therefore fully determined once human nature is, so that the acts forbidden by the Ten Commandments are not morally bad because they are forbidden, but rather they are forbidden because they are bad, because they are against human nature. Thus, God is absolutely sovereign to design human nature (except of course for logical contradictions), but once designed, He cannot contradict the moral law inherent in that nature because He cannot contradict Himself. Moral design is already in the ontological design.
BV: Whatever the solution to the Euthyphro Dilemma, it remains the case that God commanded Abraham to do something objectively immoral, even if Abraham did not know it was immoral or believed it was not immoral.
A reader offers the following comment on the immediately preceding post on the problem of dirty hands:
You write that even if one admits an absolute moral standard there are (hypothetically) situations wherein 'moral considerations are trumped by survival considerations'. Yet surely the latter collapses into the former, for what is the implicit presumption that it is good to survive but an axiological position? I use 'axiological' because it has a wider remit than moral/ethical . . . . In other words I would deny that your scenario actually 'gets outside' morality at all.
The issues are deep and difficult. I should make clear that I was not asserting that there are situations in which moral justifications are trumped by survival considerations, or by any non-moral considerations. I was merely examining how and whether this proposition enters the structure of the problem of dirty hands.
The question is whether both of the following propositions could be true. (1) It is objectively and absolutely morally wrong to kill innocent human beings, by nuking the cities of an enemy, say. (2) It is nonetheless justifiable in non-moral terms for a state, a nation, a culture, to do this to survive. (A 'reasons of state' justification.) If the joint truth of (1) and (2) is conceivable, then it is conceivable that there are situations in which moral considerations are trumped by non-moral ones.
Note that the issue is not whether nuking enemy cities, say, can be sometimes justified by moral reasoning. It can. Consequentialist moral reasoning justified Harry Truman's decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The issue is whether, on the supposition that nuking enemy cities and thus killing vast numbers of noncombatants is absolutely morally wrong –wrong always and everywhere regardless of circumstances and consequences — the absolute moral prohibition can be trumped or overruled or suspended, not by a further moral consideration, but by a non-moral one.
To get a feel for how there might (epistemic use of 'might') be a trumping or suspension of the moral/ethical, consider the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac. This is an example of what could be called 'trumping from above.' On Dylan's telling, God said to Abraham: "Kill me a son!" But Isaac was innocent and in killing him Abe would be violating God's own Fifth Commandment. Had Abe slaughtered his son he could not have justified it in terms of the moral code of the Decalogue; nor can I imagine any consequentialist line of moral reasoning that could have justified it; but he could have justified it non-morally by saying that God commanded him to sacrifice his son and that he was obeying the divine command. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he is sovereign over the moral code as the source of its existence, its content and its obligatoriness. He is outside of it, not subject to it; it is rather subject to him and his omnipotent will. We are in the vicinity of something like Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical" as conveyed in Fear and Trembling. We are also hard by the vexing Euthyphro Dilemma. (Is a command obligatory because God commands it, or does God command it because it is obligatory?) I bring up Abraham and Isaac only to suggest how there might be a 'dimension' relative to which even an absolute morality can be relativized — to put it paradoxically.
If morality can be trumped 'from above,' it can be trumped 'from below.' Imagine someone arguing that moral prescriptions and proscriptions are for the sake of human life and not the other way around. Morality is for the living, not the dead. Now human living is always the living of particular animal individuals and particulars groups. So preservation of life, my life, our life, underpins all morality. Morality is for human flourishing; it cannot enjoin our destruction. Socrates was wrong: it is not better to suffer evil than to commit evil. It is sometimes better to commit evil than to suffer it, not morally better, but better for the sake of our preservation. The non-moral imperative of survival trumps the moral imperative to not shed innocent blood. If it is us versus them, it is better that we nuke them than that they nuke us. In some circumstances there is a non-moral rational justification for violating an absolute moral prohibition.
The Counterargument. "You are assuming that survival is a value, and you are justifying the contravention of the absolute moral prohibition by invoking that value. But that value is an objective moral value. So you are not outside morality, but presupposing morality."
A Response. First, survival is something we human animals value, but it is not a moral value; it is pre-moral presupposition of their being any moral values at all. Without agents, there are no actions, hence no free actions, hence no morally responsible actions, hence no moral and immoral actions and failures to act, hence no actions attuned to moral values. The existence of agents and their preservation are values prior to the moral sphere.
Second, survival cannot be an objective moral value. In Kantian terms, consider the "maxim" of the action that would flow from the objective moral value of survival if the latter were an objective moral value. The maxim would be something like: One ought always tolook to one's survival first regardless of moral prohibitions which, if honored, could terminate or severely impair one's quality of life.
Example. Iran together with other rogue-state allies launches a war of annihilation against Israel using so-called conventional weapons. Applying the above maxim, Israel could justify nuking Teheran and others population centers. But now here is the question: could the maxim be universalized? What is universalizability?
The requirement that moral judgments be universalizable is, roughly, the requirement that such judgments be independent of any particular point of view. Thus, an agent who judges that A ought morally to do X in situation S ought to be willing to endorse the same judgment whether she herself happens to be A, or some other individual involved in the situation (someone who, perhaps, will be directly affected by A's actions), or an entirely neutral observer. Her particular identity is completely irrelevant in the determination of the correctness or appropriateness of the judgment. (Troy Jollimore, SEP)
It seems to me that the survival maxim cannot be universalized. I cannot coherently will that it should become a law of nature that everyone act according to the maxim. Kant's moral insight is that morality requires impartiality; it requires that one view matters impartially by abstracting from one's particular circumstances and identity. But survival is inherently partial. Living and surviving and flourishing in a material world is inherently one-sided: one cannot help but privilege one's own point of view.
My conclusion is that surivival, while a value, is not an objective moral value. So it seems to me that a survival justification of action that violates absolute moral norms is indeed non-moral and not moral in disguise.
Consider what a Stateside conservative talk jock, Dennis Prager, recently wrote:
The most moving interview of my 33 years in radio was with Irene Opdyke, a Polish Catholic woman. Opdyke became the mistress of a married Nazi officer in order to save the lives of 12 Jews. She hid them in the cellar of the officer's house in Warsaw. There were some Christians who called my show to say that Opdyke's actions were wrong, that she had in fact sinned because she knowingly committed a mortal sin. In their view, she compromised Catholic/Christian doctrine.
In my view — and, I believe, the view of most Catholics and other Christians — she brought glory to her God and her faith. Why? Because circumstances almost always determine what is moral, even for religious people like myself who believe in moral absolutes. That's why the act of dropping atom bombs on Japan was moral. The circumstances (ending a war that would otherwise continue taking millions of lives) made moral what under other circumstances would be immoral.
Surely Prager is contradicting himself. As Keith Burgess-Jackson comments, "It's shocking that this man doesn't understand the nature of a moral absolute. What he is espousing is situational ethics!" If there is an absolute prohibition against the taking of innocent human life, then this prohibition is in force regardless of circumstances and consequences. What is absolutely immoral cannot be "made moral" by a particular set of circumstances.
Can a view like Prager's be rescued from contradiction? It is clear that what is absolutely immoral cannot be morally justified. But it does not follow that it cannot be justified. For there may be non-moral modes of justification.
I am trying to understand the structure of the problem of dirty hands.
A clear example of a dirty hands situation is one in which a political leader authorizes the intentional slaughter of innocent non-combatants to demoralize the enemy and bring about the end of a war which, if it continues, could be reasonably expected to lead to the destruction of the leader's state. The leader must act, but he cannot authorize the actions necessary for the state's survival without authorizing immoral actions. He must act, but he cannot act without dirtying his hands with the blood of innocents. In its sharpest form, the problem arises if we assume that certain actions are absolutely morally wrong, wrong in and of themselves, always and everywhere and regardless of circumstances or (good) consequences. The problem stands out in sharp relief when cast into the mold of an aporetic triad:
A. Moral reasons for action are dominant: they trump every other reason for action such as 'reasons of state.'
B. Some actions are absolutely morally wrong, morally impermissible always and everywhere, regardless of situation, context, circumstances.
C. Among absolutely morally wrong actions, there are some that are (non-morally) permissible, and indeed (non-morally) necessary: they must be done in a situation in which refusing to act would lead to worse consequences such as the destruction of one's nation or culture.
It is easy to see that this triad is inconsistent. The limbs cannot all be true. (B) and (C) could both be true if one allowed moral reasons to be trumped by non-moral reasons. But that is precisely what (A), quite plausibly, rules out.
The threesome, then, is logically inconsistent. And yet each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. To solve the problem one of the limbs must be rejected. Which one?
(A)-Rejection. One might take the line that in some extreme circumstances non-moral considerations take precedence over moral ones. Imagine a ticking-bomb scenario in which the bomb-planter must be tortured in order to find the location of the bomb or bombs. (Suppose a number of dirty nukes have been planted in Manhattan, all scheduled to go off at the same time.) Imagine a perfectly gruesome form of torture in which the wife and children of Ali the jihadi have their fingers and limbs sawn off in the presence of the jihadi, and then the same is done to him until he talks. Would the torture not be justified? Not morally justified of course, but justified non-morally to save Manhattan and its millions of residents and to avert the ensuing disaster for the rest of the country? One type of hard liner will say, yes, of course, even while insisting that torture of the sort envisaged is morally wrong, and indeed absolutely morally wrong. I am in some moods such a hard liner.
But am I not then falling into contradiction? No. I am not maintaining that in every case it is morally wrong to torture, but in this case it is not. That would be a contradiction. I am maintaining that it is always morally impermissible to torture but that in some circumstances moral considerations are trumped by — what shall I call them? — survival considerations. These are external to the moral point of view. So while morality is absolute in its own domain, its domain does not coincide with the domain of human action in general. The torture of the jihadi and his wife and children are justified, not morally, but by non-moral reasons.
(B)-Rejection. A second solution to the triad involves rejecting deontology and embracing consequentialism. Consider the following act-type: torturing a person to extract information from him. A deontologist such as Kant would maintain that the tokening of such an act-type is morally wrong just in virtue of the act-type's being the act-type it is. It would then follow for Kant that every such tokening is morally wrong. A consequentialist would say that it all depends on the outcome. Torturing our jihadi above leads or can be reasonably expected to lead to the greatest good of the greatest number in the specific circumstances in question, and those on-balance good consequences morally justify the act of torture. So, contra Kant, one and the same act-type can be morally acceptable/unacceptable depending on circumstances and consequences. Torturing Ali the jihadi is morally justified, but torturing Sammy the jeweler to get him to open his safe is not.
On this second solution to the triad, we accept (A), we accept that moral considerations reign supreme over the entire sphere of human action and cannot be trumped by any non-moral considerations. But we adopt a consequentialist moral doctrine that allows the moral justification of torture and the targeting of non-combatants in certain circumstances.
Now we must ask: Do the consequentialist torturers of the jihadi and their consequentialist superiors who order the torture have dirty hands? Suppose the hands of the torturers are literally bloody. Are they dirty? I am tempted to say No. They haven't done anything wrong; they have the done the right thing, and let us assume, at great psychological and emotional cost to themselves. Imagine snapping off the digits of a fellow human being with bolt cutters or high-torque pruning shears. Could you do that to a child in the presence of his father and do it efficiently and with equanimity? Could you do your job, your duty, despite your contrary inclination? (I am turning Kant's phraseology against him here.) But you must do it because the orders you have been given are morally correct by the consequentialist theory.
Do the torturers have dirty hands? It depends on what exactly it is to have dirty hands whch, of course, is part of the problem of dirty hands. On a narrow understanding, a dirty hands situation is one in which the agent acts, and must act, while both accepting all three limbs of our inconsistent triad and appreciating that they are inconsistent. A dirty hands situation in the narrow and strict sense is an aporetic bind. You must act and you must act immorally in violation of absolute moral prohibitions, and you cannot justify your actions by any non-moral considerations that trump moral ones. That's one hell of a bind to be in! Some will be tempted to say that there cannot ever occur such a bind. But if so, then there cannot ever occur a dirty hands situation. So maybe talk of 'dirty hands' is incoherent.
If this is what it is to be in a dirty hands situation, then a consequnetialisdt cannot be in a dirty hands situation. He is not in an aporetic bind since he rejects (B). And the same goes for those who reject (A) or (C).
(C)-Rejection. A third solution to the problem involves holding that there is no necessity to act: one can abstain from acting. A political leader faaced with a terrible choice can simply abdicate, or simply refuse to choose. He does not order the torture of the jihadi and and hence does not act to save Manhattan; but by not acting he willy-nilly aids and abets the terrorist.
Interim Conclusion
I have the strong sense that I will be writing a number of posts on this fascinating topic. For now I will conclude that if we leave God and the soul out of it, if we think in purely immanent or secular terms, then we are in a genuine aporetic bind, and the problem of dirty hands, narrowly construed, is a genuine one, but also an insoluble one. For rejecting any of the limbs will get us into grave trouble. That needs to be argued, of course. One entry leads to another, and another . . . .
William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2015), ix + 369 pp.
This is a book philosophers of religion will want on their shelves. It collects sixteen of William E. Mann's previously published papers and includes “Omnipresence, Hiddenness, and Mysticism” written for this volume. These influential papers combine analytic precision with historical erudition: in many places Mann works directly from the classical texts and supplies his own translations. Mann ranges masterfully over a wealth of topics from the highly abstract (divine simplicity, aseity, sovereignty, immutability, omnipresence) to the deeply existential (mysticism, divine love, human love and lust, guilt, lying, piety, hope). As the title suggests, the essays are grouped under three heads, God, Modality, and Morality.
A somewhat off-putting feature of some of these essays is their rambling and diffuse character. In this hyperkinetic age it is a good writerly maxim to state one's thesis succinctly at the outset and sketch one's overall argument before plunging into the dialectic. Mann typically just plunges in. “The Guilty Mind,” for example, begins by juxtaposing the Matthew 5:28 commandment against adultery in the heart with the principle of mens rea from the criminal law. From there we move to a certain view of intentional action ascribed to a character Mann has invented. This is then followed with a rich and penetrating discussions of lying, strict criminal liability, the doctrine of Double Effect (307-9) and other topics illustrated with a half-dozen or so further made-up characters. One realizes one is in the presence of a fertile mind grappling seriously with difficult material, but after a couple of dense pages, one asks oneself: where is this going? What is the thesis? Why is the author making me work so hard? Some of us need to evaluate what we study to see if we should take it on board; this is made difficult if the thesis or theses are not clear.
I had a similar difficulty with the discussion of love in “Theism and the Foundations of Ethics.”
Central to Christian moral teaching are the two greatest commandments. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Matthew 22:35-40) Mann raises the question whether love can be reasonably commanded. Love is an emotion or feeling. As such it is not under the control of the will. And yet we are commanded to love God and neighbor. How is this possible? An action can be commanded, but love is not an action. If love can be commanded, then love is an action, something I can will myself to do; love is not an action, not something I can will myself to do, but an emotional response; ergo, love cannot be commanded.
One way around the difficulty is by reinterpreting what is meant by 'love.' While I cannot will to love you, I can will to act benevolently toward you. And while it makes no sense to command love, it does make sense to command benevolent behavior. "You ought to love her" makes no sense; but "You ought to act as if you love her" does make sense. There cannot be a duty to love, but there might be a duty to do the sorts of things to and for a person that one would do without a sense of duty if one were to love her. One idea, then, is to construe "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" as "Thou shalt act towards everyone as one acts toward those few whom one loves" or perhaps "Thou shalt act toward one's neighbor as if one loved him." The above is essentially Kant's view as Mann reports it (236 ff.) .
As for love of God, to love God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul is to act as if one loves God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul. But how does one do that? One way is by acting as if one loves one's neighbor as oneself. So far, so good. Mann, however, rejects this minimalist account as he calls it. And then the discussion becomes murky for this reviewer despite his having read it four or five times carefully. The murkiness is not alleviated by a segue into a rich and detailed discussion of eros, philia, and agape.
“Modality, Morality, and God” is written in the same meandering style but is much easier to follow. It also has the virtue of epitomizing the entire collection of essays. Its topic is the familiar Euthyphro dilemma: Does God love right actions because they are right, or are they right because God loves them? On the first horn, God is reduced to a mere spokesman for the moral order rather than its source, with negative consequences for the divine sovereignty. On the second horn, the autonomy of the moral order is compromised and made hostage to divine arbitrarity. If the morally obligatory is such because God commands it, then, were God to command injustice, it would be morally obligatory. And if God were to love injustice that would surely not give us a moral reason for loving it. Having set up the problem, Mann should have stated his solution and then explained it. Instead, he makes us slog through his dialectic. Mann's solution is built on the notion that with respect to necessary truths and absolute values God is not free to will otherwise than he wills. In this way the second horn is avoided. But how can God be sovereign over the conceptual and moral orders if he cannot will otherwise than he wills? If I understand the solution, it is that sovereignty is maintained and the first horn is avoided if the constraint on divine freedom is internal to God as it would be if “absolute values are the expression of that [God's] rational autonomy.” (168) Thus God is not free as possessing the liberty of indifference with respect to necessary truths and absolute values, but he is free as the rationally autonomous creative source of necessary truths and absolute values. Thus God is the source of necessary truths and absolute values, not their admirer. Does Mann's solution require the doctrine of divine simplicity? I dont think so. But it is consistent with it. If knowing and willing are identical in God, then the truth value and modal status of necessary truths cannot be otherise in which case God cannot will them to be otherwise.
Divine Simplicity
At the center of Mann's approach to God is the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS). But as Mann wryly observes, “The DDS is not the sort of doctrine that commands everyone's immediate assent.” (260) It is no surprise then that the articulation, defense, and application of the doctrine is a recurrent theme of most of the first thirteen essays. Since DDS is the organizing theme of the collection, a critical look at Mann's defense of it is in order.
One of the entailments of the classical doctrine of divine simplicity is that God is what he has. (Augustine, The City of God, XI, 10.) Thus God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. And similarly for the other divine attributes. The Platonic flavor of this is unmistakable. God is not an all-knowing being, but all-knowing-ness itself; not a good being, or even a maximally good being, but Goodness itself; not a wise being or the wisest of beings, but Wisdom itself. Neither is God a being among beings, an ens among entia, but ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent Being. To our ordinary way of thinking this sounds like so much nonsense: how could anything be identical to its attributes? It seems obvious that something that has properties is eo ipso distinct from them. But on another way of thinking, DDS makes a good deal of sense. How could God, the absolute, self-sufficient reality, be just one more wise individual even if the wisest? God is better thought of as the source of all wisdom, as Wisdom itself in its prime instance. Otherwise, God would be dependent on something other than himself for his wisdom, namely, the property of being wise. As Mann points out, the Platonic approach as we find it is the Augustinian and Anselmian accounts of DDS leads to difficulties a couple of which are as follows:
D1. If God = wisdom, and God = life, then wisdom = life. But wisdom and life are not even extensionally equivalent, let alone identical. If Tom is alive, it doesn't follow that Tom is wise. (23)
D2. If God is wisdom, and Socrates is wise by participating in wisdom, then Socrates is wise by participating in God. But this smacks of heresy. No creature participates in God. (23)
Property Instances
Enter property instances. It is one thing to say that God is wisdom, quite another to say that God is God's wisdom. God's wisdom is an example of a property instance. And similarly for the other divine attributes. God is not identical to life; God is identical to his life. Suppose we say that God = God's wisdom, and God = God's life. It would then follow that God's wisdom = God's life, but not that God = wisdom or that wisdom = life.
So if we construe identity with properties as identity with property instances, then we can evade both of (D1) and (D2). Mann's idea, then, is that the identity claims made within DDS should be taken as Deity-instance identities (e.g., God is his omniscience) and as instance-instance identities (e.g., God's omniscience is God's omnipotence), but not as Deity-property identities (e.g., God is omniscience) or as property-property identities (e.g., omniscience is omnipotence). Support for Mann's approach is readily available in the texts of the doctor angelicus. (24) Aquinas says things like, Deus est sua bonitas, "God is his goodness."
But what exactly is a property instance? If the concrete individual Socrates instantiates the abstract property wisdom, then two further putative items come into consideration. One is the (Chisholmian-Plantingian as opposed to Bergmannian-Armstrongian) state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. Such items are abstract, i.e., not in space or time. The other is the property instance, the wisdom of Socrates. Mann rightly holds that they are distinct. All abstract states of affairs exist, but only some of them obtain or are actual. By contrast, all property instances are actual: they cannot exist without being actual. The wisdom of Socrates is a particular, an unrepeatable item, just as Socrates is, and the wisdom of Socrates is concrete (in space and/or time) just as Socrates is. If we admit property instances into our ontology, then the above two difficulties can be circumvented. Or so Mann maintains.
Could a Person be a Property Instance?
But then other problems loom. One is this. If the F-ness of God = God, if, for example, the wisdom of God = God, then God is a property instance. But God is a person. From the frying pan into the fire? How could a person be a property instance? The problem displayed as an inconsistent triad:
a. God is a property instance.
b. God is a person.
c. No person is a property instance.
Mann solves the triad by denying (c). (37) Some persons are property instances. Indeed, Mann argues that every person is a property instance because everything is a property instance. (38) God is a person and therefore a property instance. If you object that persons are concrete while property instances are abstract, Mann's response is that both are concrete. (37) To be concrete is to be in space and/or time. Socrates is concrete in this sense, but so is his being sunburned.
If you object that persons are substances and thus independent items while property instances are not substances but dependent on substances, Mann's response will be that the point holds for accidental property instances but not for essential property instances. Socrates may lose his wisdom but he cannot lose his humanity. Now all of God's properties are essential: God is essentially omniscient, omnipotent, etc. So it seems to Mann that "the omniscience of God is not any more dependent on God than God is on the omniscience of God: should either cease to be, the other would also." (37) This is scarcely compelling: x can depend on y even if both are necessary beings. Both the set whose sole member is the number 7 and the number 7 itself are necessary beings, but the set depends on its member both for its existence and its necessity, and not vice versa. Closer to home, Aquinas held that some necessary beings have their necessity from another while one has its necessity in itself. I should think that the omniscience of God is dependent on God, and not vice versa. Mann's view, however, is not unreasonable. Intuitions vary.
Mann's argument for the thesis that everything is a property instance involves the notion of a rich property. The rich property of an individual x is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all and only the essential and accidental properties, some of them temporally indexed, instantiated by x throughout x's career. (38) Mann tells us that for anything whatsoever there is a corresponding rich property. From this he concludes that "everything is a property instance of some rich property or other." (38) It follows that every person is a property instance. The argument seems to be this:
A. For every concrete individual x, there is a corresponding rich property R. Therefore,
B. For every concrete individual x, x is a property instance of some rich property or other. Therefore,
C. For every concrete individual x, if x is a person, then x is a property instance.
I am having difficulty understanding this argument. The move from (A) to (B) smacks of a non sequitur absent some auxiliary premise. I grant arguendo that for each concrete individual x there is a corresponding rich property R. And I grant that there are property instances. Thus I grant that, in addition to Socrates and wisdom, there is the wisdom of Socrates. Recall that this property instance is not to be confused with the abstract state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. From what I have granted it follows that for each x there is the rich property instance, the R-ness of x. But how is it supposed to follow that everything is a property instance? Everything instantiates properties, and in this sense everything is an instance of properties; but this is not to say that everything is a property instance. Socrates instantiates a rich property, and so is an instance of a property, but it doesn't follow that Socrates is a property instance. Something is missing in Mann's argument. Either that, or I am missing something.
There is of course no chance that Professor Mann is confusing being an instance of a property with being a property instance. If a instantiates F-ness, then a is an instance of the property F-ness; but a is not a property instance as philosophers use this phrase: the F-ness of a is a property instance. So what do we have to add to Mann's argument for it to generate the conclusion that every concrete individual is a property instance? How do we validate the inferential move from (A) to (B)? Let 'Rs' stand for Socrates' rich property. We have to add the claim that there is nothing one could point to that could distinguish Socrates from the property instance generated when Socrates instantiates Rs. Rich property instances are a special case of property instances. Socrates cannot be identical to his wisdom because he can exist even if his wisdom does not exist. And he cannot be identical to his humanity because there is more to Socrates that his humanity, even though he cannot exist wthout it. But since Socrates' rich property instance includes all his property instances, why can't Socrates be identical to this rich property instance? And so Mann's thought seems to be that there is nothing that could distinguish Socrates from his rich property instance. So they are identical. And likewise for every other individual. But I think this is mistaken. Consequently, I think it is a mistake to hold that every person is a property instance. I give three arguments.
Rich Properties and Haecceity Properties
Socrates can exist without his rich property; ergo, he can exist without his rich property instance; ergo, Socrates cannot be a rich property instance or any property instance. The truth of the initial premise is fallout from the definition of 'rich property.' The R of x is a conjunctive property each conjunct of which is a property of x. Thus Socrates' rich property includes (has as a conjunct) the property of being married to Xanthippe. But Socrates might not have had that property, whence it follows that he might not have had R. (If R has C as a conjunct, then necessarily R has C as a conjunct, which implies that R cannot be what it is without having exactly the conjuncts it in fact has. An analog of mereological essentialism holds for conjunctive properties.) And because Socrates might not have had R, he might not have had the property instance of R. So Socrates cannot be identical to this property instance.
What Mann needs is not a rich property, but an haecceity property: one that individuates Socrates across every possible world in which he exists. His rich property, by contrast, individuates him in only the actual world. In different worlds, Socrates has different rich properties. And in different worlds, Socrates has different rich property instances. It follows that Socrates cannot be identical to, or even necessarily equivalent to, any rich property instance. An haecceity property, however, is a property Socrates has in every world in which he exists, and which he alone has in every world in which he exists. Now if there are such haecceity properties as identity-with-Socrates, then perhaps we can say that Socrates is identical to a property instance, namely, the identity-with-Socrates of Socrates. Unfortunately, there are no haecceity properties as I and others have argued.1 So I conclude that concrete individuals cannot be identified with property instances, whence follows the perhaps obvious proposition that no person is a property instance, not God, not me, not Socrates.
The Revenge of Max Black
Suppose we revisit Max Black's indiscernible iron spheres. There are exactly two of them, and nothing else, and they share all monadic and relational properties. (Thus both are made of iron and each is ten meters from an iron sphere.) There are no properties to distinguish them, and of course there are no haecceity properties. So the rich property of the one is the same as the rich property of the other. It follows that the rich property instance of the one is identical to the rich property instance of the other. But there are two spheres, not one. It follows that neither sphere is identical to its rich property instance. So again I conclude that individuals are not rich property instances.
If you tell me that the property instances are numerically distinct because the spheres are numerically distinct, then you presuppose that individuals are not rich property instances. You presuppose a distinction between an individual and its rich property instance. This second argument assumes that Black's world is metaphysically possible and thus that the Identity of Indiscernibles is not metaphysically necessary. A reasonable assumption!
The Revenge of Josiah Royce
Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin. Now it is a fact that I love myself. But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of properties, then I should love Phil equally. For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do. But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil. Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go. I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have. I prefer myself and love myself just because I am myself. My Being exceeds my being a rich property instance.
This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties. For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other. This would make no sense if the Being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties. In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual. And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual. Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.
Classical theism is a personalism: God is a person and we, as made in the image and likeness of God, are also persons. God keeps us in existence by knowing us and loving us. God is absolutely unique and each of us is unique as, and only as, the object of divine love. The divine love penetrates to the very ipseity and haecceity of me and my indiscernible twin, Phil. God loves us as individuals, as essentially unique (Josiah Royce). But this is not possible if we are reducible to rich property instances. I detect a tension between the personalism of classical theism and the view that persons are property instances.
The Dialectic in Review
One of the entailments of DDS is that God is identical to his attributes, such defining properties as omniscience, omnipotence, etc. This view has its difficulties, so Mann takes a different tack: God is identical to his property instances. This implies that God is a property instance. But God is a person and it is not clear how a person could be a property instance. Mann takes the bull by the horns by boldly arguing that every concrete individual is a property instance — a rich property instance — and that therefore every person is a property instance, including God. The argument was found to be uncompelling for the three reasons given. Mann's problems stem from an attempt to adhere to a non-constituent ontology in explication of a doctrine that was developed within, and presumably only makes sense within, a constituent ontology. Too much indebted to A. Plantinga's important but wrong-headed critique of DDS in Does God Have a Nature?, Mann thinks that a shift to property instances will save the day while remaining within Plantinga's nonconstituent ontological framework.2 But God can no more be identical to a concrete property instance than he can to an abstract property.
1 William F. Vallicella, A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002, pp. 99-104. See also Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012, pp. 86-87. See my review article, "Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 149-161.
2 See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry, “Divine Simplicity,” section 3.
Suppose I want to convince you of something. I must use premises that you accept. For if I argue from premises that you do not accept, you will reject my argument no matter how rigorous and cogent my reasoning.
So how can we get through to those liberals who are willing to listen? Not by invoking any Bible-based or theological premises. And not by deploying the sorts of non-theological but intellectually demanding arguments found in my Abortion category. The demands are simply too great for most people in this dumbed-down age.
Liberals support inclusivity and non-discrimination. Although contemporary liberals abuse these notions, as I have documented time and again, the notions possess a sound core and can be deployed sensibly. To take one example, there is simply no defensible basis for discrimination against women and blacks when it comes to voting. The reforms in this area were liberal reforms, and liberals can be proud of them. A sound conservatism, by the way, takes on board the genuine achievements of old-time liberals.
Another admirable feature of liberals is that they speak for the poor, the weak, the voiceless. That this is often twisted into the knee-jerk defense of every underdog just in virtue of his being an underdog, as if weakness confers moral superiority, is no argument against the admirableness of the feature when reasonably deployed.
So say this to the decent liberals: If you prize inclusivity, then include unborn human beings. If you oppose discrimination, why discriminate against them? If you speak for the poor, the weak, and the voiceless, why do you not speak for them?
