'Censorship' and 'self-censorship' are not dirty words. There are good and bad forms of each.
Bad self-censorship
The spreading virus of wokeness has transformed not only publishing but the entire information economy. At every level of it from school lectures to movies to Substack blogs, participants are vulnerable to having their careers ruined by a woke criticism. Everyone I know in publishing is aware of this danger and must reckon on the consequences. As a result, we now have self-censorship. It is far worse than the McCarthyism of the 1950’s because its enforcers among the woke have the ability to create instant twitters storms for which there are few effective defenses. (Edward Jay Epstein)
Good self-censorship
Self-censorship and self-regulation of words, thoughts, desires, and emotions are essential to the moral life.
No morally decent man wants ever to have to take a human life. But no manly man will be unprepared to defend against a lethal attack using lethal force, or hesitate to do so if and when circumstances require it.*
The first proposition cannot be reasonably disputed; the second can.
How might one dispute the second proposition?
I had a conversation with a hermit monk at a remote Benedictine monastery. I pointed out that the monastery was wide open to jihadis or any group bent on invasion and slaughter. He told me that if someone came to kill him, he would let himself be slaughtered.
That attitude makes sense if Christianity is true. For on Christianity traditionally understood this world is a vanishing quantity of no ultimate consequence. (I used that very phrase, 'vanishing quantity,' in my conversation with the monk and he nodded in agreement.) Compared to eternity, this life in time is of no consequence. It is not nothing, but it is comparatively nothing, next-to-nothing. Not nothing, because created by God out of nothing and redeemed by his Son. But nonetheless of no ultimate value or consequence compared to the eternal reality of the Unseen Order.
Socrates: "Better to suffer evil than to do evil." Christ: "Resist not the evildoer." Admittedly, "those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked 'to do as much evil as they please' " -- to quote from Hannah Arendt quoting Machiavelli. But again, why would this ultimately matter if the temporal is nothing as compared to the eternal?
But is Christianity true? We do not know one way or the other. Belief, even reasonable belief, is not knowledge.
If Christianity (or some similar otherworldly religion) isn't true, then he who allows himself to be slaughtered gives up his only life for an illusion. But not only that. By failing to resist the evildoer, the one who permits evil promotes evil, making it more likely that others will be violated in the only world there is.
What do I say? More important than what I say is how I live. What people believe is best shown by how they live. Talk is cheap and that includes avowals of belief. Belief itself, however, is demonstrated by action, and often exacts a cost.
Well then, how do I live? Monkish as I am, I do not spend all of my time in prayer, meditation, study, and writing. I also prepare for this-worldly evils that may or may not occur. I shoot my guns not just because I like doing so; my ultimate aim is to be prepared to kill malefactors should it prove necessary to do so to defend self, others, and civilization itself. That being said, I pray that I may die a virgin when it comes to taking a human life, even the life of an MS-13 savage or a Hamas terrorist. **
Now what kind of mixed attitude is that? Am I trying to have it both ways? If I really believe in the Unseen Order would I not allow myself to be slaughtered like the monk I mentioned? To focus the question, suppose that my wife has died and that I have no commitments to anyone else. My situation would then be relevantly similar to the monk's.
If, in the hypothetical situation, I look to my worldly preservation, to the extent that I would use lethal force against someone bent on killing me, does that not show that I don't really believe that this world is a vanishing quantity, that the temporal order is of no consequence as compared to eternity? To repeat, real belief is evidenced by action and typically comes with a price.
I do believe, as my monkish way of life attests, that this world is vain and vanishing and of no ultimate concern to anyone who is spiritually awake, but I don't know that there is anything beyond it, and I would suspect anyone who said that he did know of engaging in metaphysical bluster. Which is better known or more reasonably believed: that this transient world despite its vanity is as real as it gets, or that the Unseen Order is real? There are good arguments on both sides, but none settle the matter. I say that the competing propositions are equally reasonably believed. I believe, but do not know that God and the soul are real and so I believe but do not know that this passing scene is of no ultimate consequence (except insofar as our behavior here below affects our eternal destiny). I also believe that I am morally justified in meeting a deadly attack with deadly force, a belief that is behaviorally attested by my prepping.
Both beliefs are justified, but only one is true. But I don't know which. The belief-contents cannot both be true, but the believings are both justified. And so it seems to me, at the present stage of reflection, that by distinguishing between belief-state and belief-content, a distinction we need to make in any case, I solve my problem.
But best to sidestep the practical dilemma by invocation of my maxim:
Avoid the near occasion of violent confrontation!
This will prove difficult in coming days as we slide into the abyss. But it ain't over 'til it's over. The slide is not inevitable. If you know what's good for you, you will support Donald J. Trump for president.
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*When I counter a lethal attack with lethal force, my intention is not to kill the assailant; my intention is merely to stop his deadly attack. But to do so I must use such force as is necessary to stop him, force that I know has a high likelihood of killing him. If my intention is to kill him, then I am in violation of both the moral and the positive law.
**Compare George Orwell, a volunteer for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War: "Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him."
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of. So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin. I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.
A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.
On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.
The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually. That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.
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*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.
It needs to be said again at this time when Israel is under attack again due in no small measure to President Biden's weakness and senility. First posted 24 July 2014.
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Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite. They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right. I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.
The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility. My ability to kill, rape, pillage and plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things. But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response. If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.
Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family. Weakness does not justify.
The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas. The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.' Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.
The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left. It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona. To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico. For millions and millions it is a place to escape from. The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to. But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?
As a matter of empirical fact, we are not equal, not physically, mentally, morally, spiritually, socially, politically, or economically. By no empirical measure are people equal. We are naturally unequal. And yet we are supposedly equal as persons. This equality of persons as persons we take as requiring equality of treatment. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for example, insists that every human being, and indeed very rational being human or not, exists as an end in himself and therefore must never be treated as a means to an end. A person is not a thing in nature to be used as we see fit. For this reason, slavery is a grave moral evil. A person is a rational being and must be accorded respect just in virtue of being a person. And this regardless of inevitable empirical differences among persons. Thus in his third formulation of the Categorical Imperative in his 1785 Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant writes:
Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only. (Grundlegung 429)
In connection with this supreme practical injunction, Kant distinguishes between price and dignity. (435) "Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity." Dignity is intrinsic moral worth. Each rational being, each person, is thus irreplaceably and intrinsically valuable with a value that is both infinite -- in that no price can be placed upon it -- and the same for all. The irreplaceability of persons is a very rich theme, one I explore, with the help of the great Pascal, in Do I Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?
These are beautiful and lofty thoughts, no doubt, and most of us in the West (and not just in the West) accept them in some more or less confused form. But what do these pieties have to do with reality? Especially if reality is exhausted by space-time-matter?
Again, we are not equal by any empirical measure. We are not equal as animals or even as rational animals. We are supposedly equal as persons, as subjects of experience, as free agents. But what could a person be if not just a living human animal (or a living 'Martian' animal). And given how many of these human animals there are, why should they be regarded as infinitely precious? Are they not just highly complex physical systems? Surely you won't say that complexity as such confers value, let alone infinite value. Why should the more complex be more valuable than the less complex? And surely you are not a species-chauvinist who believes that h. sapiens is the crown of 'creation' just because we happen to be these critters.
If we are unequal as animals and equal as persons, then a person is not an animal. What then is a person? And what makes them equal in dignity and equal in rights and infinite in worth?
Now theism can answer these questions. We are persons and not mere animals because we are created in the image and likeness of the Supreme Person. We are equal as persons because we are, to put it metaphorically, sons and daughters of one and the same Father. Since the Source we depend on for our being, intelligibility, and value is one and the same, we are equal as derivatives of that Source. We are infinite in worth because we have a higher destiny, a higher vocation, which extends beyond our animal existence: we are created to participate eternally in the Divine Life.
Most of the educated cannot credit the idea of a Supreme Person.
But if you reject theism, how will you uphold the Kantian values adumbrated above? If there is no God and no soul and no eternal destiny, what reasons, other than merely prudential ones, could I have for not enslaving you should I desire to do so and have the power to do so?
Aristotle thought it natural that some men should be slaves. We find this notion morally abhorrent. But why should we if we reject the Judeo-Christian God? "We just do find it abhorrent." But that's only because we are running on the fumes of the Judeo-Christian tradition. What happens when the fumes run out?
It is easy to see that it makes no sense, using terms strictly, to speak of anything or anybody as a creature if there is no creator. It is less easy to see, but equally true, that it makes no sense to try to hold on to notions such as that of the equality and dignity of persons after their metaphysical foundations in Christian theism have been undermined.
So here you have a Nietzschean challenge to the New Atheists. No God, then no justification for your classically liberal values! Pay attention, Sam Harris. Make a clean sweep! Just as religion is for the weak who won't face reality, so is liberalism. The world belongs to the strong, to those who have the power to impose their will upon it. The world belongs to those hard as diamonds, not to those soft as coal and weak and womanish. Nietzsche:
Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation, and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation - but why should one for ever use precisely these words on which for ages a disparaging purpose has been stamped?
Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 9, What is Noble?, Friedrich Nietzsche Go to Quote
a) My strict numerical identity over time. When I regret what I did, I regret what I did, not what some other person did, and not what some earlier temporal part of me did. The fact that the passage of time does not lessen my sense of guilt is evidence that I am strictly the same person as the one who did the regrettable deed, and also that I am not a whole of temporal parts, but a substance, an endurant in contemporary jargon, wholly present at every time at which it exists.
b) The freedom of the will in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. My sense of moral failure entails a sense of moral responsibility for what I have done or left undone. Now moral responsibility entails freedom of the will.
c) The absoluteness of moral demands.
There are arguments against all three points. And there are arguments that neutralize those arguments. The philosophers disagree, and it is a good bet that they always will. So in the end you must decide which beliefs you will take as guideposts for the living of your life. My advice is that you won't be far off if you accept the above trio and such of their consequences as you can bring yourself to accept.
The first two, for example, support the immaterial and thus spiritual nature of the self. The third points us to God.
What if you are wrong? Well, you have lived well! For example, if you treat your neighbor as if he is not just a bag of chemicals but an immortal soul with a higher origin and and an eternal destiny, then the consequences that accrue for him and you will be life-enhancing in the here and now, even if the underlying belief turns out to be false.
Understand what I am saying. I am not saying that one should believe what one knows to be false because the believing of it is life-enhancing. I am saying that you are entitled to believe, and well-advised to believe, that which is life-enhancing if it is rationally acceptable or doxastically permissible.
The cardinal virtues are four: temperance, prudence, justice, and courage. Of the four, courage is the most difficult to exercise. Why is that?
Temperance and prudence are virtues of rational self-regard. Anyone who cares about himself and his long-term well-being will be temperate and prudent, whether or not he is just or courageous. This is not to say that the temperate and prudent don't benefit others; they do: The temperate who refrain from drunkenness and drunk driving benefit others by not causing trouble and by setting a good example. The prudent who save and invest do not become a burden on others and are in a position to contribute to charities and make loans to the worthy. This is why it is foolish to glorify the poor and demonize the rich. When was the last time a poor person helped fund a worthy enterprise or gave someone a job?
Temperance and prudence, then, are easy virtues despite the world's being full of the intemperate and imprudent. They are easy in that anyone who values his own life and future will be temperate and prudent. Such a one will not select as his hero the foolish John Belushi (remember him?) who took the Speedball Express to Kingdom Come.
It is harder to be just: to habitually render unto others that which is due them. For the just man must not only be other-regarding and other-respecting; he must be willing and able to discipline his lust, greed, and anger.
But courage is hardest of all. That man is courageous who, mastering his fear, exposes himself to danger for his cause. One thinks of the firefighters who entered the Trade Towers on 9/11, some of whom made the ultimate sacrifice. But Muhammad Atta and his gang were also profiles in courage. Their ends were evil, but that does not detract from the courageousness of their actions. To think otherwise, as so many do, is to fail to grasp the nature of courage.
Courage, then, is the most difficult and the noblest of the cardinal virtues. It is an heroic virtue, a virtue of self-transcendence. By contrast, there is nothing heroic about the bourgeois virtues of temperance and prudence.
But now a question is lit in the mind of this aporetic philosopher: Is it prudent to be courageous? Is there an antinomy buried within the bosom of the cardinal virtues? Can there be such a thing as a virtuous man if such a man must have all four of the cardinal virtues?
At most, there is a tension between prudence and courage. But this tension does not spill over into an antinomy. In the virtuous, prudence is subordinated to courage in the sense that, in a situation in which acting courageously is imprudent, one must act courageously.
Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192:
Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power.
I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances.
The first assurance might be thought to be not specifically religious, or at least not theistically-religious. There might be -- it is epistemically possible that there are -- objective and absolute moral distinctions without God. I hope we can agree that the wanton slaughter of human beings for one's sexual gratification is absolutely wrong: wrong always and everywhere and in every possible circumstance in which there are human beings. Take that as an example of an objectively true moral proposition. Think of propositions in a Platonic or quasi-Platonic sort of way, as subsisting independently of minds, including God's mind if a divine mind there be, and thus as belonging to a realm unto themselves apart from the realm of space, time and matter. It might then be thought that the indicative proposition just stated suffices to ground the imperative, "Thou shalt not wantonly slaughter, etc."
Is there a Platonic realm of agential oughts and ought-nots that subsist independently of mind and matter and that suffice to make it morally impermissible to, say, rape and murder for pleasure and morally obligatory to, say, feed and care for one's children? And all of this without a foundation in a divine intellect and will?
Perhaps; I can't prove the opposite. My metaphysical hunch, however, is that such Platonic moral propositions, and not just moral propositions, cannot 'hang in the air': they need support in a mind. That's my hunch, and I can articulate it rigorously in argumentative form. No argument in metaphysics in support of a substantive proposition, however, no matter how rigorously deployed, is rationally compelling. So none of my arguments will be rationally compelling. I can render my hunch reasonable, but I cannot force you to accept it on pain of your being taxed with irrationality should you not accept it.
Nevertheless, I say we need God to ground the existence of moral absolutes. Britton says as much when he says that the absolute good has power. For if the absolute good has power, then the absolute good is God.
Suppose you disagree. Free-floating Platonica suffice, you say. It is enough that there subsist in Plato's topos ouranos an entire system of such propositions as Wanton slaughter of innocents for sexual gratification is wrong and Caring for one's offspring is morally obligatory. The latter prescribes an ought-to-do, a moral must. Who enforces it? If no one does, then it is an entirely impotent ought. If we mortals sometimes enforce it, then the ought is not wholly impotent: we provide the power to enforce the moral imperatives that follow from moral declaratives.
Could a moral ought be wholly powerless? Could it be true that one ought to X and oufht to refrain from Y even if there are no consequences in the realm of fact when the prescriptions and proscriptions are violated? Could the Ideal and the Real, the Normative and the Factual subsist in such separation? Could Being be so bifurcated?
Would the moral law be the moral law were it never enforced? Enforcement is the bringing to bear of the Ideal upon the Real.
Consider the case of a philosophically sophisticated rapist. It is his pleasure to hunt women and have his way with them. He finds one in an isolated place where she cannot summon help. She pleads and protests: Rape is wrong! He admits that it is wrong. He gives a little speech:
Yes, it is true, absolutely true, that rape is objectively morally wrong. It is wrong in Plato's heaven, but here we are on earth where there is nothing to prevent me from raping you. I am strong and you are weak. I can and will satisfy my raging desire. I have no reason not to. For my raping you will entail no negative consequences for me. I will make sure of that by strangling you while I rape you. The dead tell no tales. I will not offer the pseudo-justification that might makes right, that what I am about to do to you is morally permissible because I have the power to do it. A right that might makes is no right at all. Might cannot make right. 'Might makes right' is eliminativism about right, not an identification of its essence. No such Thrasymachean sophistry for me. What I am about to do to you is not right, but wrong. But the wrongness of the deeds I am about to do has no relevance to what actually happens in this material world of fact where we find ourselves. It is a wrongness that subsists in Plato's heaven, but not here in the sublunary. The wrongness is neither here nor there.
Why should I care that rape and murder are wrong? I am not saying that they are not wrong; I am admitting that they are. I am saying that it doesn't matter in the real world. Why should I act morally in circumstances in which there are no negative consequences for me if I act immorally? Will you tell me that I must act morally because it is the morally right thing to do? That I ought to do right because it is right? Why? There is no God and no post-mortem regard or punishment. There is no enforcer of the right and there will be no one upon whom to enforce it. I grant you your Platonic moral absolutes, but they hang in the air, and in a tw0-fold sense: no God supports them in their existence, and no God enforces them in the phenomenal order. My final happiness does not depend on doing the morally right thing in those circumstances in which I can get away with doing the wrong thereby satisfying my lust for power, pleasure, and domination. Now take off your clothes!
My view is that something like God is necessary both to explain the existence of the Platonic moral absolutes and their relevance to our animal life here below. We need God both as support and as enforcer. Being is One. It is not so bifurcated that the Ideal and the Real are poles apart without communication. God bridges the gap and mediates the opposites. He brings about the mutual adjustment of virtue and happiness, to borrow a Kantian formulation. But why do we need God to do this job? Because we cannot do it all by ourselves. A truly just adjustment of virtue and happiness cannot occur for most in this life.
If the absolute good does not have (absolute) power, then the absolute good is 'neither here nor there' in both senses of this phrase.
Perhaps only unrealizable ideals do. But such 'ideals' are not ideals in the first place. Only that which is realizable by us counts as an ideal for us. Or so say I. This is a quick and dirty formulation of my Generalized Ought-Implies-Can principle.
Take celibacy. Can any healthy man in the full flood of his manhood adhere to it? St. Augustine in his Confessions somewhere remarks (I paraphrase from memory) that no man can get a grip on his concupiscence without divine assistance.
So I note an ambiguity. 'Realizable by us' is ambiguous as between 'realizable by us without outside help' and 'realizable by us with or without outside help.'
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. So I had the thought: we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of. So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin. I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.
A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.
On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.
The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually. That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.
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*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.
If you tell one lie, are you a liar? I should think not. A liar is one who habitually lies. Otherwise, we would all be liars and the term 'liar' would perish from lack of contrast.
If you have been seriously drunk a time or two, are you a drunkard? I should think not. A drunkard is one who habitually gets drunk. Otherwise we would damn near all be drunkards, and the term 'drunkard' would perish from lack of contrast.
This rumination is iterable across thief, lecher, glutton and other terms of moral disapprobation.
But if a man commits murder just one time, we call him a murderer and we feel justified in so doing. We would find it ridiculous were he to complain, "I shot man in Reno just to watch him die, but I am no murderer; a murderer is one who regularly and habitually does the deed."
How about rape? Does one rape a rapist make? I think we would say yes.
So what is the difference between murder and rape and the other cases? The gravity of the crimes would seem to be one factor and the relative rarity another.
More grist for the mill.
It is not easy to think clearly and deeply about moral questions. Few even try.
I was struck by a curious expression I found in a recent NYRB piece:
I faced criminal charges including hair-pulling, hitting during intimacy in one instance, and—the most serious allegation—nonconsensual choking while making out with a woman on a date in 2002.
As opposed to what? Consensual choking? So if you are on a date and the girl consents to being choked, then it is morally acceptable? And what sort of girl wants to be choked? Next stop: erotic asphyxiation. Why not, if it is consensual? You might even try mutual erotic asphyxiation. That might not end well, however. David Carradine's auto-erotic adventure in auto-asphyxiation in a Bangkok hotel room proved to be his last.
From another source, I gather that the hitting mentioned in the quotation is punching a girl in the head against her will. So if she wants to be punched in the head, there is nothing wrong with it?
I'd say we are living in sick times if the consent of the done to is sufficient for the moral acceptability of the doer's deed.
A reader expands our vocabulary of depravity with a link to donkey punch. Not for the easily shocked. But I think it is important to look human wretchedness hard in the face and realize what becomes of morality when it is untethered from a transcendent anchor. This is what is happening in the RCC under Bergoglio the Termite.
Here is a curious passage from Bernard Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre, sec. 147 (HT: V.V.):
. . . I take the concept of obligation in such a wide sense that it holds of every resolution which can be termed morally good, whether it is a definite duty or or merely meritorious, so that we can say of both kinds that they ought to be performed. Thus I say, for example, that one ought not lie, which is a duty; and I also say that we ought to be charitable, which is not a duty, but merely meritorious . . . (Rolf George tr., p. 192)
I see it differently. The obligatory does not include the meritorious or supererogatory. Both pertain to the actions and resolutions of rational beings. The difference is that supererogatory actions are not required, whether morally or legally, whereas obligatory actions are.
The obligatory is what one MUST do. The obligatory is the sphere of moral necessity.
The impermissible is what one MUST NOT do. The impermissible is the sphere of moral impossibility.
The permissible is what one MAY do. The permissible is the sphere of moral contingency.
The supererogatory is a proper subset of the permissible. Its intersection with the obligatory is null, and its intersection with the impermissible is also null.
Among the leftists who profess deep concern over the effect on children of the President's salty talk are leftists who endorse the killing of disabled unborn children. I call that misplaced moral enthusiasm. Which is worse: mocking a disabled reporter as Trump is alleged to have done, or the late-term abortion of the disabled unborn?
The hypocrisy is unbearable. Leftists who have worked tirelessly to normalize crudity and wanton self-expression well beyond the bounds of social responsibility now have the chutzpah to complain that POTUS is crude, obnoxious, and lacking in gravitas?
Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures on Ethics (tr. Infield, Hackett Publishing, no date), the great champion of autonomy seems to recommend abject heteronomy:
God is our owner; we are His property; His providence works for our good. A bondsman in the case of a beneficent master deserves punishment if he opposes his master's wishes. (154)
It is hard to see how this coheres with Kant's talk of persons as ends in themselves in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 428). For Kant, rational beings, whether biologically human or not, are persons. Persons, unlike things, are ends in themselves. As such, they may not be used as mere means. I may not treat another person as a mere means nor may I so treat myself. For Kant there are duties to oneself and they take precedence over duties to others since "nothing can be expected from a man who dishonours his own person." (118) The highest duty to oneself is that of self-preservation. Suicide is contrary to this highest duty and is therefore morally impermissible in all circumstances. The prohibition against suicide is exceptionless.
But how can a person be an end in itself if finite persons are created by God for his purposes? How can persons be ends in themselves if God owns us and we are his property? Is suicide wrong because it violates God's property rights? If anyone has property rights in my body, it would have to be me wouldn't it? Is man God's slave? So man is both free and enslaved?
Furthermore, if it is morally permissible for God to use finite persons as mere means to his end, self-glorification, say, then how could it be wrong for a person to treat himself as a mere means when he commits suicide?
We can put the underlying puzzle as a aporetic dyad:
1) My dignity, worth, autonomy, freedom, and irreplaceable uniqueness as a person derive from my having been created in the image and likeness of an absolutely unique free being who is the eminently personal source of all Being, truth, and value. My higher origin and destiny elevate me infinitely far above the rest of creation. I am animal, but also a spirit, and thus not merely an animal. I cannot be understood naturalistically as merely a more highly evolved animal.
2) If I am created by God both as a material being and as a person, then I cannot be an end in myself possessing autonomy and the other attributes mentioned. For if God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being, then also in my being a subject, a self-determining person.
Note that the freedom mentioned in (1) is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" as Kant derisively calls it, but the freedom of a (noumenal) agent who has the power to initiate a causal chain ex nihilo by performing an act that he could have refrained from performing, and is therefore morally responsible for performing. This rich non-compatibilist notion of freedom implies a god-like power in man that no merely natural (phenomenal) being possesses or could possess. This freedom points to a divine origin and is the respect in which we bear the image of God within us. The freedom of the human creature mirrors the freedom of the creator.
But how is this freedom and dignity and personal uniqueness, which we cannot possess except as God's creatures, logically compatible with our creature status? Presupposed is a robust conception of creation as creatio continuans according to which the entire being of the creature is sustained ongoingly by divine power (Any less robust a conception would injure the divine sovereignty.) How can the inviolable interiority of a person maintain itself in the face of God's creative omniscience?
Some will say that the paradox is a contradiction and both limbs cannot be true. Other will say that the paradox is a mystery: both limbs are true, but we cannot in this life understand how they could both be true.
The paradox is at the root of Kant's uncompromising attitude toward the morality of suicide. He prohibits it without exception despite man's freedom and autonomy because of their derivation from God. We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves.
Kant's Exceptionless Prohibition of Suicide as Essentially Christian and Unjustifiable Otherwise
Christianity too issues a total and exceptionless prohibition against suicide. The classical (philosophical as opposed to theological) arguments of Augustine and Aquinas against suicide are, however, uncompelling, as the Christian Paul Ludwig Landsberg shows. Thus he maintains that
. . . the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross. It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did. It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him. If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die. Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done. But this God is not our master as if we were slaves. He is our Father. He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom. If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification. We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death.
Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle. The puzzle, again, is how the Sage of Koenigsberg, the Enlightenment champion of human freedom and autonomy, can maintain that, no matter how horrific the circumstances, one may never justifiably take one's own life. The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.
What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.
Landsberg again:
All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs. You must carry your cross, as they did. You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love. You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross. You need it. And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways. You are a sinner. If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering? Perhaps it is a form of punishment. But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification. Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”
Paul Ludwig Landsberg, geboren 1901 in Bonn, wurde 1927 Ordinarius für Philosophie und emigrierte 1933 zunächst nach Spanien, dann nach Frankreich. Der Schüler von Max Scheler und Edmund Husserl war während der französischen Emigration eng mit dem Collège de Sociologie verbunden und starb 1944 im Konzentrationslager Oranienburg.
A 45 year old lady wants to kill herself. This is not a view that she has come to lightly. She has been thinking about suicide fairly systematically for the last five years – ever since she turned forty in fact. She can think of reasons to live – her sister, for example, will miss her if she’s gone – but she can think of many more reasons not to live.
She has thought hard about the morality of suicide. She knows that there are religious objections to the taking of one’s own life. She is aware, for instance, that the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church states that suicide is ‘seriously contrary to justice, hope, and charity’. But she isn’t religious, and doesn’t believe in the afterlife, so she isn’t much impressed by such pronouncements. She has taken into account that some people, such as her sister, will mourn her death. But she does not believe that their suffering will be very great, and certainly not great enough to outweigh what she sees as her right to do as she wishes with her own life – including ending it. She is also aware that she might feel differently about things at some point in the future. However, she thinks that this is unlikely, and, in any case, she is not convinced of the relevance of this point: certainly, she does not think that she has any responsibility towards a purely hypothetical future version of herself.
She has canvassed other people’s opinions about suicide, but so far she has heard nothing to persuade her that killing herself would be wrong. She is frequently told that she "shouldn’t give up", that "things will get better", and that she "should just hang on in there", but nobody has been entirely clear about why she should do these things. For her part, she can’t really see that she stands to lose much of anything by ending her life now. She does not value it, and in any case, if she’s dead, she’s hardly going to regret missing out on whatever it is that might have happened to her had she lived.
Question.
Would it be [morally] wrong for this woman to commit suicide? If so, why?
I will assume that the lady in question has no human dependents and that her sister has agreed to take care of her cats or other pets. My answer is that I see no compelling reason to think that it would be wrong for this woman, precisely as described, to commit suicide, assuming that she harms no one else in doing so. Of course, one can give reasons contra. But I see no rationally compelling reason contra. Let's run through some reasons that have merit. The 'argument' that suicide is always an act of cowardice has no merit.
Augustine's Main Argument
Augustine says (De Civ. Dei i, 20): “Hence it follows that the words ‘Thou shalt not kill’ refer to the killing of a man—not another man; therefore, not even thyself. For he who kills himself, kills nothing else than a man.”
To kill oneself is to kill a man; to kill a man is wrong; so, to kill oneself is wrong. Suicide is homicide; homicide is wrong; ergo, etc. Tightening up the argument:
1) Every intentional killing of a human being is morally wrong. 2) Every act of suicide is the intentional killing of a human being. Therefore 3) Every act of suicide is morally wrong.
The syllogism is valid, but the major is not credible. Counterexamples in decreasing order of plausibility: just war, capital punishment, self-defense, abortion in some cases, and, of course, suicide!
Note that (1) cannot be supported from the "Thou shalt not kill" of the Decalogue. As Paul Ludwig Landsberg correctly comments, "The Christian tradition, apart from a few sects, has always allowed two important exceptions: [just] war and capital punishment." (The Experience of Death, p. 78) I would add that the allowance is eminently reasonable.
How could suicide count as a counterexample to (1)? Well, as Landsberg points out, killing oneself and killing another are very different. (79) As I would put it, in a case of rational suicide such as the case my reader proposes, one kills oneself out of loving concern for oneself whereas the killing of another is typically, though not always, a hostile and hateful act.
Although Augustine's argument cannot be dismissed out of hand it is not rationally compelling.
Next time: The arguments of the doctor angelicus.
I'll end with one of my famous aphorisms:
One Problem with Suicide
Suicide is a permanent solution to what is often a merely temporary problem.
So don't do anything rash, muchachos. Your girlfriend dumped you and you feel you can't go on? Give it a year and re-evaluate.
We fall back again and again into our old bad habits because of our weakness on all levels: the flesh, the heart, the will, and the intellect. Our minds are dark, our wills are weak, our hearts are foul. How do we know this? By honest self-examination and a refusal to evade the truth.
The will is not strong enough to tame the animal in us and control its natural tendencies; but it is strong enough to suborn the intellect and persuade it to rationalize the free will's wrong decisions.
A will too weak to tame the flesh is yet strong enough to suborn the intellect.
Because we cannot significantly improve ourselves by our own efforts, we must seek help elsewhere, but obviously not from those who are as wretched as we are, which is to say, from fellow human beings.
On his Facebook Page, Vlastimil V. quotes Franz Brentano, approvingly, I think:
It is certain that no man can entirely avoid error. Nevertheless, avoidable or not, every erroneous judgement is a judgement that ought not to have been made, a judgement in conflict with the requirements of logic, and these cannot be modified. The rules of logic are not to be given up merely because of the weakness of our powers of reasoning. Similarly, the rules of ethics are not to be given up because of weakness of will. If a man is weak willed, ethics cannot cease to demand from him that he love what is known to be good, prefer what is known to be better, and place the highest good above all else. Even if one could show (and one cannot) that there are circumstances under which no one could remain true to the highest good, there would not be the slightest justification for setting aside the requirements of ethics. The one and only correct rule would remain evident and unalterably true: Give preference in every case to that which is better. (emphasis added)
Brentano is out to rebut the charge of excessive rigorism laid at his door step; his rebuttal, however, I find unconvincing.
Let's examine the passage sentence by sentence.
It is certain that no man can entirely avoid error.
True! So far, so good.
Nevertheless, avoidable or not, every erroneous judgement is a judgement that ought not to have been made, a judgement in conflict with the requirements of logic, and these cannot be modified.
Ambiguous. What is the force of the 'ought not' here? Is it agential or non-agential? I agree with Brentano if he is speaking of non-agential oughts. Permit me to explain.
It seems to me there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, there are non-agential oughts. Here are some examples of non-agential ought statements, statements that express an ought to be or an ought not to be as opposed to an ought to do or an ought not to do.
There ought to be fewer diseases than there are.
There ought never to have been any natural disasters.
There ought to be morally perfect people.
There ought to be perfectly logical people.
Human life ought never to have arisen.
One can imagine someone like David Benatar making the last claim. He would be saying that it would have been better had human life never arisen. And this despite the fact that no agent on his naturalist scheme could have prevented human life from arising. It even makes sense to say that it would have been better had nothing ever existed at all. Perhaps this view can be laid at Schopenhauer's door step: Ens et malum convertuntur. To be is bad. Being itself is bad to the bone. Nothingness would have been preferable.
There is a sense in which I ought to be morally perfect whether or not it is in my power to become morally perfect. And the same holds for my being logically perfect. This sense is axiological but not deontic. My being morally perfect is a better state of affairs than my being morally imperfect as I am. And this despite the fact that it is not in my power to perfect myself.
Similarly, the rules of ethics are not to be given up because of weakness of will.
True, as long as the strong-willed have the ability to abide by the rules.
If a man is weak willed, ethics cannot cease to demand from him that he love what is known to be good, prefer what is known to be better, and place the highest good above all else.
True, but see preceding comment.
Even if one could show (and one cannot) that there are circumstances under which no one could remain true to the highest good, there would not be the slightest justification for setting aside the requirements of ethics.
Here is where I disagree. Consider 'One ought to be morally perfect.' This sentence expresses an axiological requirement but (arguably) not a moral obligation because it is simply not in any human's power to perfect himself, nor is it in any finite person's power or any group of finite person's power to perfect him.
The bolded sentence conflicts with the principle that Ought implies Can. I cannot stand under a moral obligation to do what which I do not have the power to do. Now I do not have the power to perfect myself morally. Therefore, contra Brentano, one is justified, not in setting aside the requirements of ethics, but in so amending them that that reflect what is concretely possible for humans to achieve.
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?
. . . the prevailing thought of the second decade of the 21st century is not like the mid-to late-20th century. Law, virtue, and a shame culture have risen to prominence in recent years, signaling that moral relativism may be going the way of the buggy whip.
[. . .]
In The New York Times last week, David Brooks argued that while American college campuses were “awash in moral relativism” as late as the 1980s, a “shame culture” has now taken its place. The subjective morality of yesterday has been replaced by an ethical code that, if violated, results in unmerciful moral crusades on social media.
A culture of shame cannot be a culture of total relativism. One must have some moral criteria for which to decide if someone is worth shaming.
I find the article confused, but in an instructive way. What is dying is not moral relativism but moral fallibilism. And what is on the rise is not moral absolutism but moral dogmatism. People are becoming more dogmatic in their moral commitments. But this is consistent with being a moral relativist. Or so I shall argue. There are two distinction-pairs in play and they 'cut perpendicular' to each other. Absolute-relative is one pair; dogmatic-fallible the other. This makes for four combinations.
A. Dogmatic moral absolutism. Moral values and disvalues and the truths that record them are absolute: not relative to individuals, cultures, historical epochs, social classes, racial or ethnic groups, or any other index. So if slavery is morally wrong, it is wrong period, which implies that it is wrong always and everywhere and for everyone. What makes one dogmatic in one's moral absolutism, however, is the further claim to know these values and truths with certainty, and/or the readiness to act upon them uncompromisingly, by say shouting down opponents.
B. Fallibilistic moral absolutism. Moral values are absolute, but the fallibilist admits that moral judgments are fallible or subject to error. Consider the claim that a pre-natal human being is greater in value than a healthy adult dolphin. An absolutist will hold that this claim, if true, is absolutely true. But if the absolutist is a fallibilist he will admit that he could be wrong about whether it is true. The fallibilist can be expected to tolerate those who disagree while the dogmatist can be expected to be intolerant.
C. Dogmatic moral relativism. Presumably everyone reading this will agree that slavery is a great moral evil. It is a fact, however, that it was not held to be a great evil at all times and in all places. This fact inclines some to maintain that moral values are relative, to historical epochs, say. Suppose Tom is an historical relativist about moral values, but Tim is not any sort of moral relativist. They can both be uncompromisingly committed to opposing slavery even unto shaming and shunning those who think otherwise. This shows, I think, that a moral relativist can be just as dogmatic (non-fallibilist) as a moral absolutist.
I conclude from this that a rise in moral dogmatism should not be confused with a decline in moral relativism. Moral relativism may be on the decline; but this cannot be shown by citing a rise in moral dogmatism.
D. Fallibilistic moral relativism. This is a consistent position. One might hold that that moral values are culturally relative while also holding that one could be wrong about which putative values within one's culture are the binding values within one's culture, or without agreeing how to rank order competing values within one's culture. For example, liberty and equality are both values. Suppose they are not absolute but relative to Western culture. One can still have doubts about whether liberty trumps equality or vice versa. If Tom says that liberty trumps equality, and Tom is a fallibilist, then Tom will be open to arguments to the contrary.
This entry continues the discussion with Jacques about patriotism begun in Is Patriotism a Good Thing? The topic is murky and difficult and we have been meandering some, but at the moment we are discussing the ground of patriotism's moral permissibility. What makes patriotism morally permissible, assuming that it is? We have been operating with a characterization of patriotism as love of, and loyalty to, one's country. (A characterization needn't be a definition in the strict sense of a specification of the necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application of the definiendum. Or so say I.)
Here is part of our last exchange:
What makes patriotism morally permissible? I take you to be saying that what make it morally permissible is merely the fact of a country's being one's own. If that is what you are saying, I disagree. Suppose I am a native citizen of some Aryan nation the culture of which includes a commitment to enslaving non-Aryans. Surely my loyalty to this country is morally impermissible.
Hi Bill, I say it's permissible for the Aryan to be loyal to his country (or nation) because such loyalty doesn't require him to endorse slavery or do anything else especially bad. If I'm loyal to my friend, and it turns out he is a rapist, my loyalty doesn't require me to help him rape people; nor does loyalty require me to help him evade the police. At least, I can't see why loyalty to a person would require this. My suggestion is that the common culture is what enables people to form the kinds of communities that can be objects of patriotism -- not that the common culture itself has to be loved, let alone that every cultural norm or commitment must be respected by the patriot. I can even imagine a patriot who doesn't much like his own culture, but loves the members of his community nonetheless, because they're his. Just as someone might recognize that his family has all kinds of bad traits, that other families are better in some objective sense, but might still just love his family in a special way.
I take you to be committed to the proposition that a logically sufficient condition of the moral permissibility of a person's being loyal to his family is just that he be a member of it. And similarly for the moral permissibility of loyalty to larger groups up to and including the nation.
But this is entirely too thin a basis for the moral permissibility of loyalty. Why? Because it allows such permissibility even if the group to which one is loyal has no worthwhile features at all. And surely this is absurd.
You might respond that in actuality no group is devoid of worthwhile attributes. You would be right about that, but all I need is the possibility of such a group for my objection to go through.
I think you agree with me that patriotism is not jingoism. In my original post I characterized jingoism as bellicose chauvinism. So imagine some jingoist who trumpets "My country right or wrong." He could invoke your theory in justification of his attitude. He might say, agreeing with you: My country is mine, and its being mine suffices to make it morally permissible for me to prefer my country over every other, and to take its side in any conflict with any other, regardless of the nature of the conflict and regardless of any moral outrages my country has perpetrated on the other. Do you want to give aid and comfort to such jingoism?
Is your loyalty to your rapist friend (or to your Muslim friend whom you have just discovered to have participated in the Paris terrorist attack) logically consistent with turning him into the police? Assume that 'ratting him out' will lead to his execution. Would you remain a loyal friend if you did that? Can a 'rat' be loyal? I would say No, and that you (morally) must turn him in. It is morally obligatory that you turn him in. It is therefore morally impermissible that you abstract away from his attributes and deeds and consider merely the fact that he is your friend.
I take that to show that the moral permissibility of loyalty to a friend cannot be grounded merely in the fact that he is your friend.
I'm sure you've heard a lot about the Mizzou [University of Missouri] protests so I'll spare you the details. But one particular debate caught my eye. Some of these student protesters claimed that the press has no right to photograph them because to do such is an intrusion on their privacy (obviously the press has a legal right to do such). Some people respond by saying that since Mizzou is a public space (it's a public university) you have no right to privacy in public spaces. But of course you still have some right to privacy in public areas (the right not to have your person searched without a warrant, the right to use a bathroom without people watching, etc.) So what are the moral grounds (as opposed to the legal grounds) for saying that the press should have unrestricted access to photograph things in plain view in public spaces?
Protests and demonstrations occur in public, and for good reason: the whole point is to make public one's concerns. So there is something deeply paradoxical about protesters who object to being photographed or televised. It is paradoxical to go public with one's protest and then object to reporters and other people who give you publicity. It is incoherent to suppose that a space in which one is noisily protesting and perhaps disrupting normal goings-on can be a 'safe space' into which the public at large cannot intrude, even at a distance, with cameras and such.
Paradox and incoherence aside, the protesters have no moral right not to be photographed given that they have occupied and disturbed the peace of public spaces. Does the press have the unrestricted moral right to photograph things in plain view in public spaces? No, not an unrestricted right. But surely they have the right to photograph what is in plain view in a public place if the ones photographed are protesting or demonstrating whether peacefully or violently.
Suppose a couple are enjoying a tête-à-tête under a tree in the quad. Does a roving photog have the moral right to snap a photo? I say No. He has a moral obligation not to do such a thing without permission. So I would say that is not just a question of good manners, but a question of morality.
'Moralizing' is what liberals call moral discourse, just as 'judgmentalism' is what they call the making of moral judgments. 'Hypocrite' is what they call those who preach high standards.
Am I being fair? Fair enough. You are free to nuance the point to your satisfaction so long as you don't miss the truth behind my jabs.
Peter Lupu called me last night to report that it had occurred to him that the famous Euthyphro Dilemma, first bruited in the eponymous early Platonic dialog, reflects a difference between two conceptions of God. One is the God-as-Being-itself conception; the other is the God-as-supreme-being conception. After he hung up, I recalled that in June, 2009 I had written a substantial entry on the Euthyphro Problem. I reproduce it here with some edits and additions in the expectation that it will help Peter think the matter through. I look forward to his comments. The ComBox is open.
The Euthyphro Problem
The locus classicus is Stephanus 9-10 in the early Platonic dialog, Euthyphro. This aporetic dialog is about the nature of piety, and Socrates, as usual, is in quest of a definition. Euthyphro proposes three definitions, with each of which Socrates has no trouble finding fault. According to the second, "piety is what all the gods love, and impiety is what all the gods hate." To this Socrates famously responds, "Do the gods love piety because it is pious, or is it pious because they love it?" In clearer terms, do the gods love pious acts because they are pious, or are pious acts pious because the gods love them?
But leaving piety and its definition aside, let us grapple with the deepest underlying issue as it affects the foundations of morality. As I see it, the Euthyphro problem assumes its full trenchancy and interest in the following generalized form of an aporetic dyad:
1. The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands.
2. The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it.
It is clear that these propositions are inconsistent: they cannot both be true. What's more, they are contradictories: each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb of the dyad is quite reasonably accepted, or so I shall argue. Thus the problem is an aporia: a set of propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. Specifically, the problem is an antinomy: the limbs are logical contradictories and yet each limb make a strong claim on our acceptance.
Ad (1). The obligatory comprises what one ought to do, what one must, morally speaking, do. Now one might think that (1) is obviously false. If I am obliged to do X or refrain from doing Y, then one might think that the obligatoriness would be independent of any command, and thus independent of any person or group of persons who issues a command. The obligatory might be commanded, but being commanded is not what makes it obligatory on this way of thinking; it is rightly commanded because it is obligatory, rather than obligatory because it is commanded. And if one acts in accordance with a command to do something obligatory the obligatoriness of which does not derive from its being commanded, then, strictly speaking, one has not obeyed the command. To obey a command to do X is to do X because one is so commanded; to act in accordance with a command need not be to obey it. So if I obey a divine command to do X, I do X precisely and only because God has commanded it, and not because I discern X to be in itself obligatory, or both in itself obligatory and commanded by God.
There is a difference between obeying a command and acting in accordance with one. One can do the latter without doing the former, but not vice versa. Or if you insist, 'obey' is ambiguous: it has a strict and a loose sense. I propose using the term in the strict sense. Accordingly, I have not obeyed a command simply because I have acted in accordance with it; I have obeyed it only if I have so acted because it was commanded.
Consider an example. If one is obliged to feed one's children, if this is what one ought to do, there is a strong tendency to say that one ought to do it whether anyone or anything (God, the law, the state) commands it, and regardless of any consequences that might accrue if one were to fail to do it. One ought to do it because it is the right thing to do, the morally obligatory thing to do, something one (morally) must do. Thinking along these lines, one supposes that the oughtness or obligatoriness of what we are obliged to do as it were 'hangs in the air' unsupported by a conscious being such as God or some non-divine commander. Or to change the metaphor, the obligatory is 'laid up in Plato's heaven.' William James, however, reckons this a superstition:
But the moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to an overarching system of moral relations, true "in themselves," is therefore either an out‑and‑out superstition, or else it must be treated as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be ultimately based. In a theistic ethical philosophy that thinker in question is, of course, the Deity to whom the existence of the universe is due. "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" in The Will to Believe, p. 194.
James' point is that there is no abstract moral 'nature of things' existing independently of conscious beings. Thus the obligatoriness of an action we deem obligatory is not a property it has intrinsically apart from any relation to a subject who has desires and makes demands. The obligatoriness of an act must be traced back to the "de facto constitution of some existing consciousness."
Building on James' point, one could argue persuasively that if there is anything objectively obligatory, obligatory for all moral agents, then obligatoriness must be derivable from the will of an existing consciousness possessing the power to enforce its commands with respect to all who are commanded. A theist will naturally identify this existing consciousness with God.
Ad (2). In contradiction to the foregoing, however, it seems that (2) is true. To derive the obligatoriness of acts we deem obligatory from the actual commands of some de facto existing consciousness involves deriving the normative from the non-normative — and this seems clearly to be a mistake. If X commands Y, that is just a fact; how can X's commanding Y establish that Y ought to be done? Suppose I command you to do something. (Suppose further that you have not entered into a prior agreement with me to do as I say.) How can the mere fact of my issuing a command induce in you any obligation to act as commanded? Of course, I may threaten you with dire consequences if you fail to do as I say. If you then act in accordance with my command, you have simply submitted to my will in order to avoid the dire consequences — and not because you have perceived any obligation to act as commanded.
The Problem Applied to Islam
Now it seems clear that there is nothing meritorious in mere obedience, in mere submission to the will of another, even if the Other is the omnipotent lord of the universe. Surely, the mere fact that the most powerful person in existence commands me to do something does not morally oblige me to do it. Not even unlimited Might makes Right. It is no different from the situation in which a totalitarian state such as the Evil Empire of recent memory commands one to do something. Surely Uncle Joe's command to do X on pain of the gulag if one refuses to submit does not confer moral obligatoriness on the action commanded. In fact, mere obedience is the opposite of meritorious: it is a contemptible abdication of one's autonomy and grovelling acceptance of heteronomy.
And here is where Islam comes into the picture. The root meaning of 'Islam' is not 'peace' but submission to the will of Allah. But a rational, self-respecting, autonomous agent cannot submit to the will of Allah, or to the will of any power, unless the commands of said power are as it were 'independently certifiable.' In other words, only if Allah commands what is intrinsically morally obligatory could a self-respecting, autonomous agent act in accordance with his commands. In fact, one could take it a step further: a self-respecting, autonomous agent is morally obliged to act in accordance with Allah's commands only if what is commanded is intrinsically obligatory.
Of course, this way of thinking makes God or Allah subject to the moral law, as to something beyond divine control. But if there is anything beyond divine control, whether the laws of morality or the laws of logic, then it would seem that the divine aseity and sovereignty is compromised. For perhaps the best recent defense of absolute divine sovereignty, see Hugh J. McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Indiana UP, 2012. For my critique, see "Hugh McCann and the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1, Winter 2014, pp. 149-161.
God is the absolute, and no absolute can be subject to anything 'outside' it. (If you say that God is not the absolute, then there is something greater than God, namely the absolute, and we should worship THAT. Presumably this is one of Anselm's reasons for describing God as "that than which no greater can be conceived.") Otherwise it would be relative to this 'outside' factor and hence not be ab solus and a se.
The antinomy, therefore, seems quite real and is not easily evaded. The divine aseity demands that God or Allah not be subject to anything external to him. A god so subject would not be God. On the other hand, the unlimited voluntarism of the Muslim view (see Professor Horace Jeffery Hodges for documentation here and here) is also unacceptable. A god who, at ontological bottom, was Absolute Whim and Arbitrary Power, would not be worthy of our worship but of our defiance. I am reminded of the late Christopher Hitchens who thought of God as an all-seeing, absolute despot.
The Muslim view is quite 'chilling' if one thinks about it. If God is not constrained by anything, not logic, not morality, then to use the words but reverse the sense of the famous BrothersKaramazov passage, "everything is permitted." In other words, if the Muslim god exists then "everything is permitted" just as surely as "everything is permitted" if the Christian god does not exist. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality has no foundation. In the former case, everything is permitted because morality's foundation is in Absolute Whim.
To put it in another way, a foundation of morality in unconstrained and unlimited will is no foundation at all.
To 'feel the chill,' couple the Muslim doctrine about God with the Muslim literalist/fundamentalist doctrine that his will is plain to discern in the pages of the Koran. Now murder can easily be justified, the murder of 'infidels' namely, on the ground that it is the will of God.
In the West, however, we have a safeguard absent in the Islamic world, namely reason. (That there is little or no reason in the Islamic world is proven by the fact that there is little or no genuine philosophy there, with the possible slight exception of Turkey; all genuine philosophy -- not to be confused with historical scholarship -- in the last 400 or so years comes from the West including Israel; I am being only slightly tendentious.) God is not above logic, nor is he above morality. It simply cannot be the case that God commands what is obviously evil. We in the West don't allow any credibility to such a god. In the West, reason acts as a 'check' and a 'balance' on the usurpatious claims of faith and inspiration.
A Thomist Solution?
But this still leaves us with the Euthyphro Problem. (1) and (2) are contradictories, and yet there are reasons to accept both. The unconditionally obligatory cannot exist in an ontological void: the 'ought' must be grounded in an 'is.' The only 'is' available is the will of an existing conscious being. But how can the actual commands of any being, even God, the supreme being, ground the obligatoriness of an act we deem obligatory?
Suppose God exists and God commands in accordance with a moral code that is logically antecedent to the divine will. Then the obligatory would not be obligatory because God commands it; it would be obligatory independently of divine commands. But that would leave us with the problem of explaining what makes the obligatory obligatory. It would leave us with prescriptions and proscriptions 'hanging in the air.' If, on the other hand, the obligatory is obligatory precisely because God commands it, then we have the illicit slide from 'is' to 'ought.' Surely the oughtness of what one ought to do cannot be inferred from the mere factuality of some command.
But if God is ontologically simple in the manner explained in my SEP article, then perhaps we can avoid both horns of the dilemma. For if God is simple, as Sts. Augustine and Aquinas maintained, then it is neither the case that God legislates morality, nor the case that he commands a moral code that exists independently of him. It is neither the case that obligatoriness derives from commands or that commands are in accordance with a pre-existing obligatoriness. The two are somehow one. God is neither an arbitrary despot, nor a set of abstract prescriptions. He is not a good being, but Goodness itself. He is self-existent concrete normativity as such.
But as you can see, the doctrine of divine simplicity tapers of into the mystical. You will be forgiven if you take my last formulations as gobbledy-gook. Perhaps they are and must remain nonsensical to the discursive intellect. But then we have reason to think the problem intractable. (1) and (2) cannot both be true, and yet we have good reason to accept both. To relieve the tension via the simplicity doctrine involves a shift into the transdiscursive — which is to say that the problem cannot be solved discursively.
One thing does seem very clear to me: the Muslim solution in terms of unlimited divine voluntarism is a disaster, and dangerous to boot. It would be better to accept a Platonic solution in which normativity 'floats free' of "the de facto constitution of some existing consciousness," to revert to the formulation of William James.
Peter's Insight
My friend Peter Lupu sees clearly that there is a connection between the horns of the Euthyphro Dilemma and the competing conceptions of God. The first horn -- The obligatory is obligatory in virtue of its being commanded by an entity with the power to enforce its commands -- aligns naturally with the conception of God as Being itself, as ipsum esse subsistens, as self-subsistent Being. God is not a norm enforcer, but ethical Normativity Itself. The second horn -- The obligatoriness of the obligatory cannot derive from some powerful entity's commanding of it -- aligns naturally with the conception of God as a being among beings, albeit a being supreme among beings. Supreme, but still subject to the moral order.
But of course there is trouble, and the alignment is not as smooth as we schematizers would like. For on either horn, God is a supreme commander, and this makes little sense if God is self-subsistent Being itself. One feels tempted to say that on either horn God is a being among beings.
Concluding Aporetic Postscript
We cannot genuinely solve the Euthyphro Dilemma by affirming either limb. Our only hope is to make an ascensive move to a higher standpoint, that of the divine simplicity according to which God is self-subsistent Being and Ethical Requiredness Itself. But this ascension is into the Transdiscursive, a region in which all our propositions are nonsensical in Wittgenstein's Tractarian sense. We are in the Tractarian predicament of trying to say the Unsayable.
So I submit that the problem is a genuine a-poria. There is no way forward, leastways, not here below. Both horns are impasses, to mix some metaphors. But here below is where we languish. The problem is absolutely insoluble for the Cave dweller.
Philosophers who simply must, at any cost, have a solution to every problem will of course disagree. These 'aporetically challenged' individuals need to take care they don't end up as ideologues.
Some opponents of the death penalty oppose it on the ground that one can never be certain whether the accused is guilty as charged. Some of these people are pro-choice. To them I say: Are you certain that the killing of the unborn is morally permissible? How can you be sure? How can you be sure that the right to life kicks in only at birth and not one minute before? What makes you think that a mere 'change of address,' a mere spatial translation from womb to crib, confers normative personhood and with it the right to life? Or is it being one minute older that confers normative personhood? What is the difference that makes a moral difference — thereby justifying a difference in treatment — between unborn human individuals and infant human individuals?
Suppose you accept the general moral prohibition against homicide. And suppose that you grant that there are legitimate exceptions to the general prohibition including one or more of the following: self-defense, just war, suicide, capital punishment. Are you certain that abortion is a legitimate exception? And if you allow abortion as a legitimate exception, why not also capital punishment?
After all, most of those found guilty of capital crimes actually are guilty and deserving of execution; but none of the unborn are guilty of anything.
My point,then, is that if you demand certainty of guilt before you will allow capital punishment, then you should demand certainty of the moral permissibility of abortion before you allow it. I should add that in many capital cases there is objective certainty of guilt (the miscreant confesses, the evidence is overwhelming, etc.); but no one can legitimately claim to be objectively certain that abortion is morally permissible.
I claim that the standard objections to the Potentiality Argument (PA) are very weak and can be answered. This is especially so with respect to Joel Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality," which alone I will discuss in this post. This often-made objection is extremely weak and should persuade no rational person. But first a guideline for the discussion.
The issue is solely whether Feinberg's objection is probative, that and nothing else. Thus one may not introduce any consideration or demand extraneous to this one issue. One may not demand of me a proof of the Potentiality Principle (PP), to be set forth in a moment. I have an argument for PP, but that is not the issue currently under discussion. Again the issue is solely whether Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" refutes the PA. Progress is out of the question unless we 'focus like a laser' on the precise issue under consideration.
Of course, the removal of all extant objections to an argument does not amount to a positive demonstration of the argument's soundness. But at the risk of being tedious, the issue before us is solely whether Feinberg's objection is a good one.
The PA in a simplified form can be set forth as follows, where the major premise is the PP:
1. All potential persons have a right to life. 2. The fetus is a potential person. ----- 3. The fetus has a right to life.
What Feinberg calls the "logical point about potentiality" and finds unanswerable is "the charge that merely potential possession of any set of qualifications for a moral status does not logically ensure actual possession of that status." (Matters of Life and Death, ed. Regan, p. 193) Feinberg provides an example he borrows from Stanley Benn: A potential president of the United States is not on that account Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.
It seems to me that Feinberg's objection, far from being unanswerable, is easily answered. Let me begin by conceding something that is perfectly self-evident, namely, that inferences of the following form are invalid:
4. X is a potential possessor of qualifications for a certain moral or legal status S ergo 5. X is an actual possessor of qualifications for status S.
This is a glaring non sequitur as all must admit. If x potentially possesses some qualifications, then x does not actually possess them. So of course one cannot infer actual possession from potential possession. A five-year-old's potential possession of the qualifications for voting does not entail his actually having the right to vote.
But what does this painfully obvious point have to do with PP? It has nothing to do with it. For what the proponent of PP is saying is that potential personhood is an actual qualification for the right to life. He is not saying that the fetus' potential possession of the qualifications for being a rights-possessor makes it an actual rights-possessor. He is saying that the actual possession of potential personhood makes the fetus a rights-possessor. The right to life, in other words, is grounded in the very potentiality to become a person.
What Feinberg and Co. do is commit a blatant ignoratio elenchi against the proponents of PA. They take the proponent of the PA to be endorsing an invalid inference, the (4)-(5) inference, when he is doing nothing of the kind. They fail to appreciate that the potentialist's claim is that potential personhood is an actual (and sufficient) qualification for the right to life.
Of course, one can ask why potential personhood should be such a qualification, but that is a further question, one logically separate from the question of the soundness of Feinberg's objection.
I have just decisively refuted Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality" objection. What defenders of it must do now, without changing the subject or introducing any extraneous consideration, is to tell me whether they accept my refutation of Feinberg. If they do not, then there is no point in discussing this topic further with them. If they do, then we can proceed to examine other objections to PA, and the positive considerations in favor of PA.
What makes patriotism morally permissible? I take you to be saying that what make it morally permissible is merely the fact of a country's being one's own. If that is what you are saying, I disagree. Suppose I am a native citizen of some Aryan nation the culture of which includes a commitment to enslaving non-Aryans. Surely my loyalty to this country is morally impermissible.
[. . .]
Posted by: BV | Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 02:43 PM