An interesting story broke a few days ago when truthout.org released an Air Force PowerPoint presentation used in an ethics training program given to its nuclear ballistics personnel. The Air Force promptly withdrew the materials after truthout.org’s complaints of the citations to the Bible and other religious sources, as well as a quote from an ex-Nazi SS officer, Wernher Von Braun.
Particularly after listening to the author Jason Leopold’s radio interview podcast, I was amused—as I always am at anti-religion crusaders—that he could be so irate at the use of religious sources in a discussion about ethics, as well as irate at the use of a quotation attributed to an ex-Nazi officer. How could he condemn Nazism else by some objective moral standard? If there are no fixed moral laws, neither Nazism nor nuclear holocaust has any moral quality. They are simply matters of preference. If that were the case, we might as well rig the launch sequence to a Facebook poll.
Clearly, however, Mr. Leopold subscribes to an objective moral standard. The world is more than mere matter in motion. There are truths beyond mere observable reality. But in the strident secularist’s world, such topics are off limits.
Why do I have to believe in a man in the sky to have a moral code?
You absolutely don’t.
It helps, however, when it comes to getting other folks to also follow it. Moreso when it comes to getting other folks to not hit you over the head with a rock and take your stuff to the benefit of themselves and their immediate family.
But it hurts when other folks want to kill you and your family for believing in the wrong guy, or the right guy wearing the wrong colored clothes.
Yes, but that happens without men in the sky as well.
The meme of the man in the sky is quite useful for a lot of things. I don’t know exactly how useful atheism, as a meme, is.
It’s too soon to tell.
Most atheists still have a man in the sky. They just say that he actually lives in the ground and is called “the environment”, or he lives in their computer and is called “net neutrality”, or he lives in a law book and is called “intellectual-property reform”, or he lives in economics theory and is called “fair distribution of wealth”…
Sorry, completely wrong, but nice try at equivocation. We have a nice jar of Turtle Wax and a months supply of beef jerky as a parting gift.
One might think of it this way: Assume everyone owns a telephone. (Not a stretch, at least in our country.) Thus, anyone can pick up the receiver, dial, and start talking. But we don’t say he is “talking on the phone” unless he has subscribed to a telephone network that allows him to actually make contact with other telephone users. Until he does this, he is just talking to himself.
This is about what takes place with moral reasoning. Anyone can “pick up the phone” and start saying things like “Hitler was bad,” “Stalin was bad,” “Pol Pot was bad.” But if he denies the existence of ephemeral things like “telephone networks,” there is no other explanation but that, according to his own worldview, he is talking to himself. A man who thus rejects the preconditions of moral reality and yet proceeds to make moral claims is, in a sense, a madman.
That is, if you assume that religion is a precondition for moral reasoning, then there is no moral reasoning without religion. Funny how that works.
Bingo. I believe killing large groups of people is wrong because every human being has the right to life. Not because a book told me so, but because my own beliefs that all of humanity has those same rights.
And as a side note, I do have a ‘telephone network.’ It’s called secular humanism.
> I believe killing large groups of people is
> wrong because every human being has
> the right to life.
There are 10 people in a lifeboat, and it is taking on water. You’re a professional seaman, and in your estimation the boat will go down in the next 5 minutes unless three people take the plunge.
You announce this to the occupants, and they all accept your expertise but none choose to jump over the side.
Do you jump over the side? Or does your right to life stand even should you choose not to exercise it?
If someone pops two people on the head and throws them out of the boat, do you jump overboard to make it three, or do you try and stop the guy from doing it a third time?
Regardless of whether or not you choose to jump over the side, do you believe that everyone is in the right to choose not to jump over the side, even though it means everyone dies?
If you have a terminal disease and you’re going to die in the next month, do you have more of an obligation to take the plunge over someone who does not?
Here’s my problem with the “everyone has a right to life” as a foundational principle: without more context, I can’t predict your answers to any of those questions. Moreover, we can pick 10 random people who say they rely upon this as a root principle and ask them these same questions, and get 10 different sets of answers.
Sorry, I deal in the real world, not midterm questions in a Philosophy course. In a real world situation like you submit, people are for the most part going to act out of a sense of self-preservation, not of any philosophy.
But, I’ll happily deal with the fact my ideals on ya’ know, not killing innocent people because they deserve life works out 99.9% of the time.
> Sorry, I deal in the real world, not midterm
> questions in a Philosophy course.
I love this objection to philosophy. I never get tired of it.
> In a real world situation like you submit,
> people are for the most part going to act
> out of a sense of self-preservation, not of
> any philosophy.
Well, sure. That’s sort of predicted in the hypothetical.
Are they *wrong*, or *right*, in your view? Or is the question not applicable or without answer (either of which, by the way, is totally an okay position as far as I’m concerned)?
> But, I’ll happily deal with the fact my ideals
> on ya’ know, not killing innocent people
> because they deserve life works out 99.9%
> of the time.
I’ll go out on a limb and state that just about every framework of morality is going to work out fine 90%+ of the time.
It’s the other 10% that makes the frameworks interesting, after all.
For the record, *I* deal in the real world.
Jesse happens to be deceived by his own false consciousness.
I’m working on him, though.
Wait a minute. Without religion, there is no differentiation between good and evil? If that’s what you’re suggesting, I reject it. Both Bentham and Kant provide pathways to objectively distinguish good from evil that can be applied completely without reference to the supernatural. To be sure, they explore very different pathways there, and their conclusions about what is good and what is evil do not always harmonize with one another other than on broad issues. But the track records of various religions with regard to convergent conclusions on difficult questions isn’t all that great, either.
Which is to say, acceptance of the existence of the supernatural, and acceptance of a body of dogma and particularly ritual proposed by humans concerning the supernatural, is not a precondition of moral reality.
Burt,
As I further explain in another comment below, either Bentham or Kant might satisfy Benthamites or Kantians concerning our aggression against Nazis. They would not satisfy Nazis or anyone else, however, unless their were first Benthamites or Kantians. And there is no particularly reason anyone is compelled to be a Benthamize or a Kantian. If morality does not have any universal nexus, then it is not morality we are talking about at all, but mere preference.
They would not satisfy Nazis or anyone else, however, unless their were first Benthamites or Kantians.
Nazis being difficult to please strikes me as being a problem for neither Benthamites nor Kantians.
But it is, Jaybird. This is why we fight Nazis for mass murder but not Belgium for dipping their fries in mayonnaise. For one of those, there is a nexus by which we expect universal conformity. For the other, it is hopeless flight of fancy.
Both Bentham and Kant proffer universal nexii. The principle of utility (greatest good for greatest number) is universal in its application; so too is the categorical imperative (act by the rule that the reasonable person would have made universalized). Each is at least claimed by its proponent to not only be universal but also undeniable.
It’s true that there is no compulsion to adopt Kant or Bentham’s moral calculus. But there is also no compulsion to adopt Christianity, or Islam, or Buddhism and indeed, thoughtful people of faith typically insist that true adherence to a religion must be volitional rather than compelled. Maybe that’s not your view, which hardly means you’re not thoughtful about it, but I fail to see how religion is any less as “preference” than is choosing between utilitarianism and deontology.
Which leads to Jaybird’s question, why does the Nazis’ acceptance or rejection of any particular moral calculus matter? The Nazis were operating from such a faulty moral calculus that mass murder was something they believed to be justified. So if the Nazis would reject an argument based on the authority of Bentham or Kant, what makes you think they would accept an argument based on the authority of Jehovah? The question of moral justification should be ideally asked to an objective, distinterested, and rational judge — and a justification of “God said it was okay” is not one that stands up to objective, disinterested, rational analysis because faith is inherently not susceptible of objective proof or disproof.
The “compulsion,” in my view, is that to fail to subscribe to a worldview that makes sense of moral objectivity, causation, order, and other non-empirical preconditions to intelligibility, one is rendered “foolish,” as the Apostle Paul said.
At any rate, morality cannot be a matter of preference, can it? Let’s say that if Bob is a Benthamite and Chuck is a Christian, they might agree on most matters. But in those matters in which their respective moral frameworks, properly applied, lead to different results, is their disagreement real or illusory? Do they have a disagreement of morality or a disagreement of preference? Seems to me that by your reasoning, they have a disagreement of preference only, since the source of their disagreement is their preference of one moral framework over another.
Dude! My essay talked about this!
Jaybird,
So, to use the parlance of your essay, in the case of moral disagreements, I am the one saying “God,” and Burt is the one saying “Shut up.” For the sake of discussion, I usually opt to leave open the possibility of other transcendental sources for moral authority rather than insisting immediately upon God, or more specifically, the Christian God. I would also imagine Burt would object to his position being distilled as “shut up.”
Notwithstanding, you’re about right.
I hate having to explain my jokes:
They both resolve down to “shut up”.
FTR, I don’t think I am saying “shut up,” and to the extent that Jaybird’s taxonomy reduces everything to “God” or “shut up,” I disagree with it.
I don’t think morality is a matter of preference, although I do think a lot of social convention gets dressed up as morality (viz., cultural abhorrence or acceptance of homosexuality) and social convention is a matter of preference.
I’m also pleased with Tim’s idea that a theoretical objective source of morality might be transcendent rather than supernatural. I suppose most religionists would argue that God is both of those things, but for those of us who eschew belief in the supernatural, this creates some room for common ground and fellow-travelling in terms of searching for some way to separate preferences and social conventions from things that are based on that which has more substance. That’s both more pleasant and more productive than atheists and believers pointing fingers, scowling, and calling one another names.
This is why we fight Nazis for mass murder but not Belgium for dipping their fries in mayonnaise.
This barbarism has gone on too long, if you ask me. If I were President, we’d be bombing Belgian henhouses right now.
Did I say I’d never link to this again?
Well, I lied.
Here it is, the number one result for a google search of “vector morality”, that essay I wrote!
Sigh.
*NOW* I’ll never link to it again.
Why are comments on that article closed?
That was a great read, by the way.
I think we have an auto-close after X days function.
Jaybird,
I understand that your moral framework posits choice and options/complexity as the standard for judging actions. But so far as I can tell, you do not provide a basis for why anyone should accept that standard. Christian morality, for example, establishes the two necessary conditions for waging war on Nazis: (1) it provides a framework that concludes the Nazis’ actions are morally reprehensible, and (2) it makes claims to universality and undeniability, i.e., that God is sovereign, his moral laws are incontestable and binding on all men, and that those laws are revealed to man such that he can know good from evil. There is virtually no limit to the number of moral systems that might satisfy (1), but typically only “religion” satisfies (2). In that regard, secular humanism, to the extent it is a religion, is exceptionally feeble.
Nazis are easy.
Gay marriage is difficult.
But so far as I can tell, you do not provide a basis for why anyone should accept that standard.
I’d be interested in hearing why they chose one over that one.
I’d be interested in hearing why they chose none at all.
Mostly I’d be interested in hearing that they chose something after much rumination rather than just reacted.
Because I smile and nod and think “I still win” if they do that.
The wacky thing is that you can use my tests and *STILL FIGHT THE NAZIS*. There’s this thing about being opposed to mass slaughter in there.
The questions come when it comes to stuff like “gay marriage” or “explicit lyrics” where Christianity has reached one answer and my theory reaches another… and I can explain, in detail, why I reached the conclusions that I have.
What answers does Christianity have to the Gay Marriage Question, at the end of the day?
Leviticus? Romans? Unitarians might point to James, perhaps. They may say “we live under a new Covenant now” and wave a lot of stuff away… but, at the end of the day, they’re making appeals that seem dreadfully arbitrary.
Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.
I see what you did there, DD.
The Dude abides.
I’m surprised that I got to it first.
Suppose two religions conflict with respect to principle P. By their own lights, both are universal and undeniable. Clearly one is wrong. What settles the matter?
Eschatological verification, if applicable.
Tim:
What if it *is* turtles all the way down?
You seem to posit that a moral framework isn’t legitimate unless its declared axioms have the force of a supreme entity behind them. This begs two questions:
One, explain how you know the will of the supreme entity (which will require you to explain a long history of debate over what this will is, since we humans have a long history of standing firm on an interpretation that we then reject later)?
Two: why does the supreme entity have to be beneficent?
The first one is the real stickler (the second, of course, blows the whole discussion out of the water). Presupposing that God does exist, and God is the Rule-Maker, doesn’t get you full knowledge of what the Rules actually are. Since this has to come from imperfect humans, you don’t really have the moral authority that you think you do.
In other words, the secular humanist may be relying upon a subjective standard (moral relativism), but the theist is also relying upon a subjective standard (imperfect understanding of the objective standard of God’s will).
I don’t see how this, in practice, solve the question of resolving moral quandaries.
BTW, “turtles all the way down” is NOT the cosmological argument of classical theism. Word up.
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/07/so-you-think-you-understand.html
Yes, Tom, but there’s a tricky bit in there.
“What defenders of the cosmological argument do say is that what comes into existence has a cause, or that what is contingent has a cause.”
This is only distinguishable from “everything has a cause” if there are things that exist that never came into existence, or if there are things that exist that don’t exist.
And while this is indeed a better representation of the cosmological argument of classical theism than “everything has a cause”, it’s not entirely inaccurate (or unreasonable, really) to shorthand your objection that way.
Because there’s no foundational reason to presuppose that “things can exist without coming into existence.” If you don’t believe this to be true, the cosmological argument collapses into “everything has a cause”.
It’s axiomatic, either way, because if something *did* in fact exist without coming into existence, it would be impossible to show this to be true. You either believe it, or not.
And if you believe that something can exist without coming into existence, you *do* then have to do some explaining to clarify how this can be the case without *anything* coming into existence without a cause. Again, these arguments already exist, but that doesn’t mean that one has to deconstruct every one of them.
“Aquinas in fact devotes hundreds of pages across various works to showing that a First Cause of things would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and so on and so forth.”
Certainly, to pretend that Aquinas didn’t exist is somewhat disingenuous. However, one doesn’t have to refute all of what was written in those hundreds of pages if one rejects some core number of Aquinas’s premises, right?
Feser’s got some interesting posts in there, thanks for the pointer.
Feser vs. “the turtle” argument first:
This gives us what I regard as “the basic” test for determining whether an atheist is informed and intellectually honest. If he thinks that the cosmological argument rests on the claim that “everything has a cause,” then he is simply ignorant of the basic facts. If he persists in asserting that it rests on this claim after being informed otherwise, then he is intellectually dishonest. And if he is an academic philosopher like Le Poidevin or Dennett who is professionally obligated to know these things and to eschew cheap debating tricks, then… well, you do the math.
There’s more to Feser’s argument for classical theism, “God” as sustainer, Being itself, what keeps the atoms together, the electrons “spinning about” the nucleus. Hope you enjoy poking through his archives. You may remain unconvinced, but honest men like Anthony Kenny end up merely “unconvinced” rather than asserting the argument is wrong as do the New Atheists, who are simply out of their league.
Or as a commenter put it,
“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” —Bertrand Russell
Turtles. 😉
> If he thinks that the cosmological argument
> rests on the claim that “everything has a
> cause,” then he is simply ignorant of the basic
> facts.
Or, (s)he rejects the possibility of existence for a thing that uniquely exists without having come into being.
That’s not the same thing as being ignorant of the basic *argument*, let alone “facts”. It’s just a rejection of a axiom.
> If he persists in asserting that it rests on this
> claim after being informed otherwise, then
> he is intellectually dishonest.
That makes it very easy for Feser to lump ’em in the, “I don’t have to listen to this dude” box, doesn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong, Tom, I find many of the arguments against theism, theology, organized religion, the Catholic church, etc. to be comprised of weak sauce, so I sympathize with Feser, especially as this appears to be his wheelhouse and thus he gets more of the dreck shoveled his way than I ever will. This particular post you’ve linked to here reminds me of this (which you might enjoy quite a bit) excellent post.
Actually, you’d probably find Professor Dutch an interesting bloke on the whole.
Patrick, Feser is dealing with “Being” itself, not creation. Therefore to speak of “a thing” has already overshot the mark. I wish I could hold the Feser end of the Feser argument up better; metaphysics is not my area of focus. I’ll keep my eye on the comments over at his place to see you take on Da Man Hisself.
😉
I just wanted to lay some breadcrumbs down for those satisfied with leaving it at the turtles. They should not be.
[My favorite Feser:
Student: Why do you always make these obscure references?
Feser: I guess I’m the Dennis Miller of philosophy.
Student: Who?
Feser: See what I mean?]
[I ran across Prof. Dutch before, on honest arguing vs. fallacies. Righteous dude.]
Cheers.
> I ran across Prof. Dutch before, on honest
> arguing vs. fallacies. Righteous dude.
Read his global warming stuff, m’friend.
Christian morality, for example, establishes the two necessary conditions for waging war on Nazis
I’d be more impressed by this if Nazis and their helpers weren’t almost exclusively people raised as Christians.
@Mike, “raised as Christian” does not make one morally Christian. The Nazis put the strongly Christian moralists in concentration camps or graveyards early on, to send a message to those of weaker persuasion. It worked.
Breivik was supposedly “raised as Christian” (ie Norway is a pseudo-Christian country) and that was all the Post needed to “declare” that he was a Christian fundamentalist. The fact that he never belonged to a church did not enter into the equation.
If one doesn’t believe in an afterlife, nor punishment for transgressions, simple acts of aggression like murdering 77 innocent people just amounts to “doing your thing”. Society casts a jaundiced eye on such behavior for obvious reasons, but the truly pathological would happily engage in such antics until they are caught (if ever). Dahmer, Manson, Bundy, Ridgeway, and these are just the American serial killers. I believe there’s a Russian who killed over 140 but remember, we only know these guys because they’ve been caught. There could be someone out there driving a semi who’s been killing people for decades and no one has connected the dots. Since there’s no afterlife, and no (or little) chance of getting caught why stop? And there’s the rub.
I’d be interested in a demonstration that Christians are on the whole more moral than agnostics and atheists, that doesn’t depending on defining away the evildoers as “not real Christians”.
Mike,
The claim is not that Christians are more moral than others. The claim is that Christians (and other faithful, but my defense would specifically be as to Christianity) have a superior worldview that provides a better intellectual account for how we intuitively understand the world. I’ve argued this point elsewhere as to causation and induction, but the point holds just as true for morality.
I’d add for clarity that the Christian view holds a limited number of possibilities for what is right and wrong, where unassisted reason can lead to very many more undesirable places.
One could theoretically assert, ad hoc, a philosophy virtually identical to the Judeo-Christian ethos, a Christianity without Christ, or religion, or even a deity atall.
In fact, this has rather been the modern project, except that its lack of a transcendent foundation and its accommodation of hedonism produce a less efficacious simulacrum, although on many issues, close enough for rock’n’roll.
> I’d add for clarity that the Christian view holds
> a limited number of possibilities for what is
> right and wrong
It does? Ineffability seems to produce the precisely opposite result.
> where unassisted reason can lead to very many
> more undesirable places.
Oh, that I’m all on board with, to be sure.
Well, at least as far as natural law goes, I think its “ineffability” doesn’t translate to a wide swath of the real world once you roll up your sleeves a bit and apply some “right reason.” [You can get in the zone just with the Stoics.] I also think the aesthetics of Deuteronomy and Leviticus are a bit over-accused, since the Jews didn’t normatively carry out such death sentences.
And again, the “religious wars” of the late medieval period came to be seen as theological error, if religion can even be blamed more than temporal politics.
In contrast, I’ve been blegging for a long time for a “modern” objection to “mild” eugenics ala Singer and Savulescu, both eminently reasonable men, and still unrefuted except on ad hoc aesthetic/sentimental grounds. Perhaps someone can help me out.
A top of the head objection one might present to “mild” eugenics is that “you’re probably going to mess that up”. Jaybird’s vector proposal would provide a rejection of eugenics on the basis of reducing agency, I would think.
FWIW, I haven’t read much about Savulescu.
Also, side note: I expect active genetic engineering on human beings to be common by the end of the 21st century. First candidates will be things like anemia, presuming they can be easily linked to a small set of changes in the subject’s genetic makeup. Whether or not it is a good idea is another question entirely, of course.
Oh, it’s all the question, as in what is human? As for the “vector” thing, I haven’t been following, sorry. Still, I’ll guess there’s still some “self-evident” premise about the human person at the core of “agency.”
And yes, I too expect no limits on manipulation and control of the human genome. Such a brave new world.
That’s a strong statement, not well supported by any actual evidence of the behavior of the people who claim to hold that worldview.
Dude, you’re the one who said that the Nazis were Christians. If you’re not going to accept that premise as arguable, despite what the Nazis actually did to German Catholics, then it’s not even worth having a discussion about it.
@ward
> If one doesn’t believe in an afterlife, nor
> punishment for transgressions, simple
> acts of aggression like murdering 77
> innocent people just amounts to “doing
> your thing”
I think you may have to do a little more lifting here. The belief in an afterlife isn’t new, but it’s hardly something that’s been rocking around forever.
Indeed, early conceptual afterlifes were pretty freaking grim. And yet humanity survived, which seems sort of interesting if the alternative is, “Screw it, dude, let’s just waste a bunch of people for entertainment”.
The fear of hell sure put a damper on all those priest.
Gladiators. The classical world had some serious faults.
@DD.: Try to read what I said before criticizing it.
@All: Judaism doesn’t have any definite beliefs about an afterlife, and it certainly doesn’t present one’s possible after-death accommodations as the primary reason to behave oneself.
Is it possible for a non-theistic notion of right and wrong to make claims to universality and undeniability? Maybe a non-theist would not claim that the knowledge of good and evil comes not from God, but the non-theist could still make the claim from universality. And the notion that God has revealed the laws just begs the question (in the sense of assumes what is meant to be proven) on whether God exists.
These modern ad hoc moralities tend to ape Christian ethos anyway. But utilitarianism and the like really have no answer for eugenics, even the “mild” forms of Julian Savulescu and Peter Singer.
Clearly, what Christians have claimed as divine moral givens can prove oppressive. The Bible and Christian history alike provide copious examples. But, serious as that setback is, it is not of itself a reason to deny moral givens. Singer himself now seems more inclined to accept as much.
He described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects Hume’s view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true. At the conference, he offered two possible examples, that suffering is intrinsically bad, and that people’s preferences should be satisfied. He has not yet given up on preference utilitarianism. Neither is he any more inclined to belief in God, though he did admit that there is a sense in which he “regrets” not doing so, as that is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question, why act morally? Only faith in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/25/peter-singer-utilitarianism-climate-change
Singer’s arguments have always scared me because he is quite a reasonable, indeed honest man.
Mr. Kowal,
For a change, I almost completely agree with your original post, although not necessarily your elaborations in the comments.
The real surprise to me is that anyone is surprised that a Chaplain would use references to God in a Powerpoint. That’s like, their thing. You want to get rid of chaplains and/or nukes that’s a defensible position – though I disagree. But criticizing a chaplain for mentioning the Christian God is rather missing the point.
(The only real quibble I have with the powerpoint is the last bullet point on the “The Nuclear Ethics Question” slide: essentially, ‘It’s OK to blow up the world because the Navy already did it’)
(And yeah Von Braun was a Nazi, but he was only sort of a Nazi, and he was one of our Nazis, and is of course is more famous as the father of the American Space Program. In any case, the mid 20th century is an awfully hard place to look for ethical and moral angels)
He aimed for the stars and often hit London.