Filed under: Lewis Moore, objective moral values, preference claims, relativism
Moral subjectivists reject the claim that objective moral values (rightness and wrongness) are real life features of reality—my hunch is they know the entailments (God or something a lot like Him)! This is why the subjectivist is content to assert that the “good” and “what I prefer” are one and the same thing. This maneuver is an attempt to reduce objective moral values to amoral preference claims. But does this maneuver work?
Blogger Lewis Moore gives us two reasons to think preferences are different than morals:
1. People feel obligated to perform moral actions, but not preferences.
In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis makes the distinction between moral obligation and instinct. I think the same distinction could be made between preferences and morals. No one feels obligated to eat cookie dough instead of vanilla ice cream, but everyone feels obligated to keep promises, remain faithful to their spouses and so on. So we obviously feel something about moral statements that we do not feel about preferences.
2. “What I prefer” and the “good” are not interchangeable.
Lewis Moore explains: If “good” and “what I prefer” are the same thing, then they can be used interchangeably. However, I can always ask, “Is it good that I prefer this to that?” and I am obviously not asking, “Is it preferable to me that I prefer this to that?” Likewise, if I say, “what I prefer is good” I am obviously not saying, “What I prefer is what I prefer.
Disclaimer—this isn’t an attack on gays and lesbians. In other words, please don’t use this post or thread as an opportunity to bash those folks or anyone else. Thanks!
While ones physiology (i.e. the brain) probably affects mental content and behavior, it seems to fall short in directly causing all mental contents and behavior to obtain given agent causation. This is why when your significant other cheats on you, you don’t write them a pass because their physiology causally determined them to do so. You hold them responsible knowing they are free agents capable of doing otherwise.
There has been an argument by gay and lesbian advocates to the affect that homosexuality is controlled by the brain over which they have no control over—as such homosexuals are not responsible for their gay and lesbian lifestyle but are living as nature has causally determined them to live. Yet the very same people who hold that homosexuality is controlled by the brain will turn around and get upset at homophobic people who are unsympathetic to their view.
If homosexuality is to be explained solely in terms of ones physiology and the laws of nature—and it is not within the agent’s power to be free from homosexuality—is it also the case that homophobia is the result of ones physiology and it is not within this agent’s power to be free? It seems to me that if physical structure is fundamentally responsible for all else (as these advocates seem to suggest) then if there are gay genes, aren’t there are also straight, beast loving, pedophile, pissed off genes, and so forth? And if so, how are we to hold individuals genuinely responsible for anything? It’s hard to see that we can!
If one reflects on their moral condition with the corollary that God exists, Christianity looks really good. In an interview, William Lane Craig stated something like, all of us who are adults recognize our moral failures and short comings and if God exists then we find ourselves morally responsible and accountable before a Holy and Righteous God. The resurrection of Jesus and the cross offers us forgiveness and moral cleansing and reconciliation with a loving God. This parallels the sense of my moral intuitions at least. The beauty and plausibility of Christianity is that it agrees with our moral intuitions about what God would be like, in case He existed. That God would be holy, righteous, and just, explains moral failure. That God would be love, explains his desire to be in a relationship with us. When the Judeo/Christian account indicates that God has lowered the bar of success so that everyone can enter into a love relationship with Him, I’m buying it. When the scriptures indicate that God’s love and reconciliation doesn’t require performance, but faith, commitment and grace, my intuitions are satisfied. For me the veridicality of my moral intuitions are satisfied with the gospel of Christ. Coincidence? Maybe… but I really don’t think so. The peace I have from a commitment to Christ far surpasses anything I’ve ever known.
1. I’m not anti-empiricism; though I see it as truncated.
2. Any criterion or theory of knowledge is arbitrary, leads to circularity, and warrants skepticism. This is why I’m not handcuffed to some specified law of justification. More, this is why there is no philosophical consensus on what ought to count as*evidence.*
3. Knowledge comes in degrees of certainty. For instance, I admit that knowledge from the senses gives us a greater degree of certainty, than say, introspection or rational reflection. I.e. I am more certain my hand exists than my wife loves me. But this doesn’t matter much.
4. One should not limit what one can see or directly be aware of to the five senses. “One can be directly aware of one’s own soul and inner states of thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs and so forth by introspective awareness of one’s inner life.” I mentioned this briefly, when I discussed qualia and first person perspective. (And the uniqueness of qualitative particulars cannot be reduced to brain states. My qualia isn’t located in a spatio-temporal location such that the neuroscientist can remove my tissue, place it in your head, and *wallah*, you share my exact experience-refer to multiple-realization.)
5. A good objection to my (close to) reformed epistemological position is that it leads to epistemic relativism. But, of course, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of knowledge coming from non-empirical directions. From the fact that some specified subjective experience may be delusional, it doesn’t therefore follow that all subjective experiences are delusional. Do you know of any *non-arbitrary* argument which prohibits epistemic justification from immediate experience? I don’t.
6. Now, the assertion, “there is only empirical knowledge and truth” is not itself an example of an empirical knowledge or truth. There is nothing one could see, touch, taste, smell, or hear that would provide the slightest evidence for this claim. And one can always ask: “What sight would confirm that we shouldn’t believe or assert what we can’t test with our five senses? What sound? Could a smell, taste or touch tell us that it is true? Obviously not. Because the statement of empiricism itself is not the sort of thing that can be tested by something that can be seen, smelled, tasted, touched or heard, it can’t possibly be tested with the five senses. But this means that it fails to meet its own standard of acceptability and is, therefore, self-refuting.”
This is why I wrote in a different thread:
Lewis Moore takes issue with the assertion that empirical data is necessary for a belief to be rational. They might say that you shouldn’t believe anything unless it has been empirically proven—that no belief unsupported by empirical evidence can be rational—that one cannot say something is true unless there is empirical evidence for it or some such thing. This seems problematic to me. What empirical evidence do we have for the claim that one shouldn’t believe a proposition which isn’t empirically proven? Or, in other words, do we have empirical data that shows that one shouldn’t believe a proposition which isn’t empirically proven? And if not, then one should not believe that empirical data is necessary because it doesn’t meet the empiricists’ own standard for belief. This isn’t to discredit empiricism as such, but only the claim I have heard many empiricists make that empirical data is necessary for rational belief. This doesn’t refute the empiricist claim that knowledge arises out of sense data, but I think it does refute the popular claim that beliefs without empirical evidence are in some way irrational.
Filed under: Alvin Plantinga, Something from Nothing, The Hard Problem, consciousness
1. Given the fact that Calvinism violates my conception of what it is for God to be good, I ought to accept it only if it can be established biblically beyond a reasonable doubt.
2. Probably, Calvinism cannot be established biblically beyond a reasonable doubt.
3. Therefore, probably, I should not accept Calvinism.
…It is easy to think of these notions (Heaven and Hell) in geographic terms–that they are places, one where God is and one where God isn’t. Such conceptualization will be avoided here given the serious problems with geographic conceptions. …What makes heaven heavenly is the experience of the union with God it involves, not golden streets and the like. … (Moreover, it is incoherent to describe God as omnipresent and yet hold that hell is a place where God isn’t. What’s lacking in hell is, rather, the blessing and beauty of a joyful union with God for all eternity. The language of heaven and hell must be understood as relational, not geographic.) So the language of heaven and hell should be thought of in terms of some ultimate good…
What do you think of this?
If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents — the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts — i.e., of Materialism and Astronomy — are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk-jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.
(“Answers to Questions on Christianity”)
Here is why matters of perspective (”It’s up to each one of us to interpret what God wants”) minus correspondence equals nothing statements.
It’s unwise to suggest that because God is sovereign He is therefore the direct cause of every single event in life. God is not the author of evil! In terms of sovereignty, God prior to creation, saw it fit to actualize this possible world. He could have created a different world, one with different people and consequences but He saw it good to create the one we know. There are better ways to discuss sovereignty than to attribute all events to God. Sovereignty is not synonymous with causation.
“In Hebrew thought they have this extraordinarily strong sense of divine sovereignty in which everything that happens in a sense can be attributed to God. But they don’t see this as antithetical or exclusive of human freedom by any means. A beautiful illustration of this is the story of Saul’s suicide in 2 Samuel and Chronicles. In Samuel it describes Saul as he sees the Philistines about to take him and so in order to avoid capture by the Philistines Saul falls on his own sword and commits suicide. In the Chronicles account we have the same story with Saul committing suicide but the Chronicler adds this commentary, “thus the Lord slew Saul” (1 Chronicles 10:14).”
And so there is a sense that both Saul and God are responsible for the suicide – Saul more directly of course. Part of this Jewish manner seems to be an understanding of God’s directive will (a will in which he is the effective cause of an event) and a permissive will (a will in which he permits the acts of his creation).
There are countless Jewish examples of this in scripture. We might remember the Joseph story where he acknowledges both the will of men and God. And I quote, “”As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Gen 50:20). I don’t think we want to interpret a Jewish understanding of sovereignty in such a way as to obliterate human free agency thereby relieving men from responsibility. The Jews didn’t, why should we? Joseph seemed to understand that it was his brothers who sold him into slavery but that God used it for a greater purpose.
