Making Moral Claims Without Doing the Groundwork

Last updated on: May 20, 2019 at 12:58 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

This post was recently posted on Facebook by someone I know and I was added to the link. I want to deal with this here because it is not only something this other person does all the time, but it is a really common occurrence when arguing about morality and moral claims. I have talked about all the things I will talk about here very frequently, but I will try to draw them all together in several pieces (I will link to a lot of my previous articles so not to make this series massively long, even though it already is!). I was commissioned by John Loftus a few years back to write a chapter on exactly this subject for his anthology Christianity Is Not Great (link to my series drawing on my chapter). My views will be split over several pieces.

Without further ado, here is what he said:

HOW NOT TO ARGUE – KNIFE CRIME AS EXAMPLE One can approach knife crime as a baffling and inexplicable phenomenon that could be happening on another planet. One can commission studies that address it at the statistical level as if it is a mathematical phenomenon to be solved by the stats. But this is to adopt a very particular behaviourist approach which looks at human behaviour in terms of surface appearances. To do this is to adopt a very specific model of what a human is. So, correlations between school exclusions, money invested in youth clubs, unemployment etc will give you the ‘answers’ (they usually involve blaming the Government of the day). The answer, then is to apply money at the place indicated by the stats. Anyone who quarrels with this is hit over the head with studies considered to have the privileged last word on the matter, called unscientific, a refuser of ‘evidence’, naive, bad or even mad.

However, the very distinctive, statistical behaviourist approach strangely excludes a vital element from the phenomenon we are supposedly examining and one with which, being human ourselves, we are all familiar. It excludes moral interiority, responsibility and agency in the carrier of the knife, the very things that differentiate us from animals and because of which every sophisticated society has courts assuming moral accountability. Strange things to blink at you might think. The interesting this is that a person who has no expertise in behaviourist data collection and statistics can see this from the viewpoint of their simple humanity. So what value the statistical approach if the statisticians haven’t even considered the full nature and parameters of what they are studying?

I don’t want to discuss the causes of knife crime here. I don’t want to insist on proving the existence of moral responsibility. I simply want to point out the faultiness of the argumentative methodology. Those who adopt the purely statistical, behaviourist approach (which may garner some interesting information) should have the good manners to ask if their interlocutors feel this method is satisfactory and addresses the whole picture. The very adoption of that model shapes the conclusion by excluding key avenues in human nature at the outset. What value, then, does the experiment have? It’s studying a phenomenon by assuming at the outset that it has a different nature from what it actually has.

I simply use this as an example of how the behaviourist approach to the problem is as much up for discussion as its conclusions are. To exclude the moral may be one of the reasons for the problem. Shouting at the sceptic who doubts the methodology because the statistics prove the case is vain as the issue is, can statistics prove the case here?

It’s interesting that David Lammy’s approach in 2012, where he put knife crime down to the moral vacuum created by paternal absenteeism, might address the moral issue better.

Essentially, we shouldn’t look at data concerning behaviour and concentrate on internal moral causality. And by this, he also means devaluing the biosocial jigsaw of causality that causes moral behaviour. This is merely morality, absent, it appears, of any other causal influence so that it can just be the domain of the agent (uncaused) in its causality. As you can tell, we have argued the toss over free will.

This guy is a moral deontologist who believes in free will and God (though in a much more traditional, British and conservative sense than in any evangelical American sense). He is a pretty standard conservative who believes that morality exists inside people as a driver and he would here is two things that look very similar to a form of essentialism. I remember when we were arguing at Tippling Philosophers that he felt quite strongly about gender norms in a very sensualist manner quite similar to natural law theory and to Thomistic philosophy.

These sorts of comments should sum him up:

As in leaving out the moral element in humans which can’t be reduced to data

And I don’t need books to tell me that morality exists here and now. I and you and everyone else can’t do without it in our daily discourse. It’s like saying I need a book to convince me I need oxygen. All I need is the accoutrements of my present humanity. That’s my authority [This is not to say he isn’t well-read – JP]
I start from the my engagement with the real as all real philosophers do.

It’s part of our essence. Your quotations prove it. The moment you criticise Trump for being a fascist.

So on and so forth. You get the idea. One of his favourite philosophers is Roger Scruton who is a pretty standard conservative deontologist.

Bottom-Up and Top-Down

He takes great pleasure in disagreeing with pretty much everything I say. Part of this is because we disagree on pretty much all our conclusions by coming at things fro completely different angles.

The problem, as far as I’m concerned, is that he argues from his conclusions and not to them. This is one of the main points on want to make today. I wrote an article many years ago entitled “Top down or bottom up?“:

This is fundamental, in many senses, to me. It is why I spend a lot of time trying to establish the building bricks of philosophy, such as “what is an abstract idea?” So often we argue on the veneer, and so often this means that our conclusions or claims are propped up with little more than biases and bluster.

For me, the bottom-up approach is by far the more justifiable one.

If you look at this image about chip design (or something, it doesn’t really matter), you will get my point:

Here you can see that the left-hand approach has a conclusion which is correct if the whole thing is built correctly. The importance is in the construction, which should ensure truth if built with the correct bricks. The right-hand option smacks of ad hoc. If it doesn’t seem to work (is true) then just mess around with fixing things at the last stages, working under the assumption, nothing more, that the initial building blocks and desires and plans are correct.

At the end of the day, looking down on things is pretty arrogant, and assumes that you know best.

Abstract Objects

To argue that morality is just inside of us like some kind of magic fairy dust is merely wishful thinking and ends up being just an assertion. He doesn’t even really offer any proper deontological arguments. But that’s beside the point. Let’s look at the ontology as a whole. We know from the Philpapers survey that, even after 3000 years of moral philosophising, we are at an impasse for moral philosophers. No one single moral framework fully works. They are all problematic. This is why no one can agree. Indeed, any philosopher who coherently argued indubitably for a fully working moral framework would get the Nobel Prize. It hasn’t been done and it won’t be done.

And it can’t be done.

Morality is the ultimate of abstract objects. In order to understand the nature of morality, we need to understand the nature of abstract objects. What this comment does is to confuse actions that he has ascribed to moral value to with morality. But to ascribe something abstract to something concrete is quite a jump and needs some explaining, but this explaining is never ever done. Actions are themselves events with real, physical properties. Intentions are different to actions in that they are states of minds, but we know that the mind supervenes on the brain, the physical.

Mind – Brain Supervenience

There are several ways to show this:

1)The evolution of species demonstrates that development of brain correlates to mental development. E.g. “We find that the greater the size of the brain and its cerebral cortex in relation to the animal body and the greater their complexity, the higher and more versatile the form of life” (Lamont 63). Lamont, Corliss. The Illusion of Immortality. 5th ed. New York: Unger/Continuum, 1990.

2) Brain growth in individual organisms:

“Secondly, the developmental evidence for mind-brain dependence is that mental abilities emerge with the development of the brain; failure in brain development prevents mental development (Beyerstein 45). Beyerstein, Barry L. “The Brain and Consciousness: Implications for Psi Phenomena.” In The Hundredth Monkey. Edited Kendrick Frazier. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991: 43-53.

3) Brain damage destroys mental capacities:

“Third, clinical evidence consists of cases of brain damage that result from accidents, toxins, diseases, and malnutrition that often result in irreversible losses of mental functioning (45). If the mind could exist independently of the brain, why couldn’t the mind compensate for lost faculties when brain cells die after brain damage? (46).” Ibid

4) EEG and similar mechanisms used in experiments and measurements on the brain indicate a correspondence between brain activity and mental activity:

“Fourth, the strongest empirical evidence for mind-brain dependence is derived from experiments in neuroscience. Mental states are correlated with brain states; electrical or chemical stimulation of the human brain invokes perceptions, memories, desires, and other mental states (45).” Ibid

5) The effects of drugs have clear physical >>> mental causation.

Merely reading into Phineas Gage should open one’s eyes, here.

Back to Abstracts

Everyone who reads this blog regularly will know that it’s one of my favourite topics. That’s because it underwrites pretty much everything. And this is what I mean about arguing from the bottom up. If you don’t establish what abstract ideas are, pretty much the rest of philosophy is just preference. It arguing from a conclusion that you like but it’s not building up to a conclusion. It is a castle in the sky.

Morality is an abstract idea, so surely we would need to know what an abstract idea is and what its ontology (principles of existence) is? As many of you know, I am a conceptual nominalist.

Nominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals, specifically accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type. For example, Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats, or, the fact that certain properties are repeatable, such as: the grass, the shirt, and Kermit the Frog are green. One wants to know in virtue of what are Fluffy and Kitzler both cats, and what makes the grass, the shirt, and Kermit green.

The realist answer is that all the green things are green in virtue of the existence of a universal; a single abstract thing that, in this case, is a part of all the green things. With respect to the color of the grass, the shirt and Kermit, one of their parts is identical. In this respect, the three parts are literally one. Greenness is repeatable because there is one thing that manifests itself wherever there are green things.

Nominalism denies the existence of universals. The motivation for this flows from several concerns, the first one being where they might exist… Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal. But this raises the question: Where is this universal realm? One possibility is that it is outside of space and time…. However, naturalists assert that nothing is outside of space and time. Some Neoplatonists, such as the pagan philosopher Plotinus and the philosopher Augustine, imply (anticipating conceptualism) that universals are contained within the mind of God. To complicate things, what is the nature of the instantiation or exemplification relation?

Conceptualists hold a position intermediate between nominalism and realism, saying that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality.

Moderate realists hold that there is no realm in which universals exist, but rather universals are located in space and time wherever they are manifest. Now, recall that a universal, like greenness, is supposed to be a single thing. Nominalists consider it unusual that there could be a single thing that exists in multiple places simultaneously. The realist maintains that all the instances of greenness are held together by the exemplification relation, but this relation cannot be explained.

Finally, many philosophers prefer simpler ontologies populated with only the bare minimum of types of entities, or as W. V. Quine said “They have a taste for ‘desert landscapes.’” They attempt to express everything that they want to explain without using universals such as “catness” or “chairness.”

As ever, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on nominalism is great – here. As is the SEP entry on abstract objects – here. As is the superb SEP entry on properties found here. Other useful SEP entries are Challenges to Metaphysical Realism, Platonism in Metaphysics, and the wiki entry on the Third Man Argument (an argument from Plato that shows an incoherent infinite regress in relational universals, which can be found in the SEP here).

To illustrate this, let’s now look at the “label” of “chair” (in a very cogent way, all words are abstractions that refer to something or another, but nominalists will say that these abstractions, or the relationship between them and the reference points, do not exist, out there, in the ether). This is an abstract concept, I posit, that exists, at most, only in the mind of the conceiver. We, as humans, label the chair abstractly and it only means a chair to those who see it as a chair—i.e. it is subjective. The concept is not itself fixed. My idea of a chair is different to yours, is different to a cat’s and to an alien’s, as well as different to the idea of this object to a human who has never seen or heard of a chair (early humans who had never seen a chair, for example, would not know it to be a chair. It would not exist as a chair, though the matter would exist in that arrangement). I may call a tree stump a chair, but you may not. If I was the last person (or sentient creature) on earth and died and left this chair, it would not be a chair, but an assembly of matter that meant nothing to anything or anyone.^[i] The chair, as a label, is a subjective concept existing in each human’s mind who sees it as a chair. A chair only has properties that make it a chair within the intellectual confines of humanity. These consensus-agreed properties are human-derived properties, even if there may be common properties between concrete items—i.e. chairness. The ascription of these properties to another idea is arguable and not objectively true in itself. Now let’s take an animal—a cat. What is this “chair” to it? I imagine a visual sensation of “sleep thing”. To an alien? It looks rather like a “shmagflan” because it has a “planthoingj” on its “fdanygshan”. Labels are conceptual and depend on the conceiving mind, subjectively.

What I mean by this is that I may see that a “hero”, for example, has properties X, Y and Z. You may think a hero has properties X, Y and B. Someone else may think a hero has properties A, B and X. Who is right? No one is right. Those properties exist, in someone, but ascribing that to “heroness” is a subjective pastime with no ontic reality, no objective reality.

This is how dictionaries work. I could make up a word: “bashignogta”. I could even give it a meaning: “the feeling you get when going through a dark tunnel with the tunnel lights flashing past your eyes”. Does this abstract idea not objectively exist, now that I have made it up? Does it float into the ether? Or does it depend on my mind for its existence? I can pass it on from my mind to someone else’s using words, and then it would be conceptually existent in two minds, but it still depends on our minds. What dictionaries do is to codify an agreement in what abstract ideas (words) mean, as agreed merely by consensus (the same applies to spelling conventions—indeed, convention is the perfect word to illustrate the point). But without all the minds existing in that consensus, the words and meanings would not exist. They do not have Platonic or ontic reality.

Thus the label of “chair” is a result of human evolution and conceptual subjectivity (even if more than one mind agrees).

If you argue that objective ideas do exist, then it is also the case that the range of all possible entities must also exist objectively, even if they don’t exist materially. Without wanting to labour my previous point, a “forqwibllex” is a fork with a bent handle and a button on the end (that has never been created and I have “made-up”). This did not exist before now, either objectively or subjectively. Now it does—have I created it objectively? This is what happens whenever humans make up a label for anything to which they assign function etc. Also, things that other animals use that don’t even have names, but to which they have assigned “mental labels”, for want of better words, must also exist objectively under this logic. For example, the backrubby bit of bark on which a family of sloths scratch their backs on a particular tree exists materially. They have no language, so it has no label as such (it can be argued that abstracts are a function of language). Yet even though it only has properties to a sloth, and not to any other animal, objectivists should claim it must exist objectively. Furthermore, there are items that have multiple abstract properties which create more headaches for the objectivist. A chair, to me, might well be a territory marker to the school cat. Surely the same object cannot embody both objective existences: the table and the marker! Perhaps it can, but it just seems to get into more and more needless complexity.

When did this chair “begin to exist”? Was it when it had three legs being built, when 1/2, 2/3, 4/5, 9/10 of the last leg was constructed? You see, the energy and matter of the chair already existed. So the chair is merely a conceptual construct. More precisely a human one. More precisely still, one that different humans will variously disagree with.

Let’s take the completed chair. When will it become not-a-chair? When I take 7 molecules away? 20? A million? This is sometimes called the paradox of the beard / dune / heap or similar. However, to be more correct, this is an example of the Sorites Paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus. It goes as follows. Imagine a sand dune (heap) of a million grains of sand. Agreeing that a sand dune minus just one grain of sand is still a sand dune (hey, it looks the same, and with no discernible difference, I cannot call it a different category), then we can repeatedly apply this second premise until we have no grains, or even a negative number of grains and we would still have a sand dune. Such labels are arbitrarily and generally assigned so there is no precision with regards to exactly how many grains of sand a dune should have.

This problem is also exemplified in the species problem which, like many other problems involving time continua (defining legal adulthood etc.), accepts the idea that human categorisation and labelling is arbitrary and subjective. The species problem states that in a constant state of evolving change, there is, in objective reality, no such thing as a species since to derive a species one must arbitrarily cut off the chain of time at the beginning and the end of a “species’” evolution in a totally subjective manner. For example, a late Australopithecus fossilised skull could just as easily be labelled an early Homo skull. An Australopithecus couple don’t suddenly give birth to a Homo species one day. These changes take millions of years and there isn’t one single point of time where the change is exacted. There is a marvellous piece of text that you can see, a large paragraph[ii] which starts off in the colour red and gradually turns blue down the paragraph leaving the reader with the question, “at which point does the writing turn blue?” Of course, there is arguably no definite and objectively definable answer—or at least any answer is by its nature arbitrary and subjective (depending, indeed, on how you define “blue”).

End result? Realism is, in my opinion, untenable and conceptual nominalism (conceptualism) is not only a more coherent argument, it is also borne out by actual data and the world around us.

Here are a number of articles on abstract objects that you can read so that I don’t make this unnecessarily long:

Philosophy fundamentals – abstracts and abstract ideas
The Pertinence of Nominalism to Religious and Philosophical Debates
Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) – Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism
The “I”, personhood and abstract objects
My Atheistic Moral Philosophy; Objective, Subjective and Theistic Morality

Morality – What Is It? Abstract.

But what this commenter needs to do is to establish some kind of ontic realism. This is why moral positions are often categorised into realism and anti-realism. But morality is a conceptual construct that we create in order to navigate the world as a social species. Without it, society would fall apart. That is precisely because society has been constructed using morality as both a tool and a currency. So when we both say it exists, there is some kind of equivocation.

Let’s set out the basics. What is morality? Generally, the study of morality is split into three components: descriptive morality, meta-ethics and normative morality. Normally philosophers replace the term ‘morality’ with ‘ethics’. Descriptive ethics is concerned with what people empirically believe, morally speaking. Normative ethics (which can be called prescriptive ethics) investigates questions of what people should believe. Meta-ethics is more philosophical still in attempting to define what moral theories and ethical terms actually refer to. Or,

What do different cultures actually think is right? (descriptive)

How should people act, morally speaking? (normative)

What do right and ought actually mean? (meta-ethics)

Of course, this kind of philosophising is a prime example of an abstract past time! Descriptively, it seems fairly self-evident to me that moral skepticism is evident. The fact that no moral philosophy works perfectly, the fact that we all believe slightly different things of morality, shows that there is, descriptively, subjectivity concerning moral philosophy.

Either that, or it is hidden somewhere in the world or in the mind of God (see my article “16 Problems with Divine Command Theory ” for a big critique of such deontological ethics). The problem here is that we have to subjectively interpret it so it becomes subjective at any rate. As Kant said, we can’t know things-in-themselves. Add to that the fact that we can make huge errors in accessing this source of morality and you end up having a scenario where you have to construct them using moral reasoning anyway. Which is precisely what happens.

Deontology is the idea that there is some objective, mind-independent moral framework. If this can’t exist outside of sentient minds, then we have a problem. If all humanity or all sentient creatures were to die, then the concept of morality (the existence of morality) would die with those sentient creatures. Again, this is something I’ve talked about almost endlessly, it seems.

The basic point is that you simply can’t decontextualise morality. This is what deontology seeks to do and is doomed to failure. The enquiring murderer and other similar thought experiments put paid to this. Reductio ad absurdum of deontology leads to conclusions where deontologists would actually allow any number of horrible things to happen in the name of rigid morality. Kant’s Categorical Imperative is criticized because the instruction to create rules which should be universal is vague and subject to the potentially flawed opinion of anyone using it.

Richard Carrier writes a fantastic essay to show that all moral value systems defer to virtue ethics anyway: “Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same” (he argues for Goal Theory, which looks not too disimilar to desirism, in my opinion).

But what does this mean if morality is conceptual and not ontically real? Well, it means that these conceptual ideas like morality have to be constructed by minds. All minds are independent of each other but they have similar biological construction as well as cultural and historical similarities. Therefore, we often agree on things. However, we also often disagree. The only way of navigating this is to agree by consensus. And this is precisely what happens. This is how democracy works and how laws get written. You vote in a ruling party that can change the law based on a majority rule. Or you have some kind of dictatorship that doesn’t do this…

But in the most representative forms of government and society, we use consensus to work out how best to exist with each other. We use consensus to write dictionaries. We use consensus to make laws. We use consensus to make policies. So on and so forth. Otherwise, it is just might makes right. Historically, of course, this is precisely what happened before the Enlightenment period and the development of political ideals.

Conclusion

It is difficult to make any such article concise because as soon as you make one claim you have to then establish that by using something more fundamental and then establish that using something more fundamental. This is precisely why you have to start from the bottom and work your way up. I am having to do this again for the purposes of establishing why this commenter and myself disagree so often (and so I am sorry to my regular readers for massively repeating myself here!). I maintain that abstract ideas are conceptual (existing individually only in our minds and the minds of any sentience, higher-level thinking creature) and if we want to establish any abstract claims (such as morality and thus politics and regulation and law), we need to do so by consensus. This is both descriptively true, but is also evidenced by point of fact that no philosopher has fully and completely coherently established any moral value system.

In the next piece, I will look at this the earlier bio social jigsaw that leads to the development of moral behaviour. Just a little hint to get you going:

The second part can now be read here.

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Aquinas’ Essence and Existence Argument: A Critique

Last updated on: May 2, 2019 at 11:09 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

Aquinas is famous for a number of arguments for God’s existence, one such one being the argument from essence and existence from De Ente et Essentia [On Being and Essence]. I will briefly summarise it here.

Everything supposedly has both essence and existence and they are two separate properties; only God has them together.

The essence of something is the “what” of a thing – what it is. You can describe a lion and this would be its essence. That description, or that essence, though, does not make it exist.

The most prominent argument for the distinction is that you can know thing’s essence without knowing whether or not it exists, in which case its existence must be distinct from its essence.

Effectively, this then becomes a cosmological argument, a Prime Mover argument. The Aesity of God looks to show that God is the only entity whose essence and existence are indistinguishable. God is self-existent, though that is not to say he created himself, as, Thomists will claim, neither did any other god.

St. Thomas seeks to show that God is his own existence as well as his own essence. God has his Being of himself and to himself such that he is Absolute being and the definition of existence. Since God’s essence is his nature and God’s existence is the same as his essence it follows that God is existence….

Or, more formally, as syllogism:

Primary Argument:

P1. Whatever a thing has besides its essence must be caused by the constituent principles of that essence or by some exterior agent.

P2. Consider a created thing. It is impossible for a created thing’s existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles because nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence if its existence is caused.

C1. Therefore, a created thing has its existence different from its essence.

P3. God is the first efficient cause.

C2. As the first efficient cause, anything God has cannot be due to an exterior agent. C3. God’s essence is identical to his existence.

Secondary Argument:

P1. Existence is that which makes every form or nature actual. Existence is actuality as opposed to potentiality.

P2. There is no potentiality in God; only actuality.

P3. God is his essence.

C1. Since God is actuality his essence is existence.

For a look at many arguments against this position as formulated in the Kalam Cosmological Argument, see my book Did God Create the Universe from Nothing?. For now, I want to just look at these ideas of essence and existence.

The IEP shows how Aquinas sees these ideas:

In the second stage of argumentation, Thomas claims that if there were a being whose essence is its existence, there could only be one such being, in all else essence and existence would differ. This is clear when we consider how things can be multiplied. A thing can be multiplied in one of three ways: (i) as a genus is multiplied into its species through the addition of some difference, for instance the genus ‘animal’ is multiplied into the species ‘human’ through the addition of ‘rational’; (ii) as a species is multiplied into its individuals through being composed with matter, for instance the species ‘human’ is multiplied into various humans through being received in diverse clumps of matter; (iii) as a thing is absolute and shared in by many particular things, for instance if there were some absolute fire from which all other fires were derived. Thomas claims that a being whose essence is its existence could not be multiplied in either of the first two ways (he does not consider the third way, presumably because in that case the thing that is received or participated in is not itself multiplied; the individuals are multiplied and they simply share in some single absolute reality). A being whose essence is its existence could not be multiplied (i) through the addition of some difference, for then its essence would not be its existence but its existence plus some difference, nor could it be multiplied (ii) through being received in matter, for then it would not be subsistent, but it must be subsistent if it exists in virtue of what it is. Overall then, if there were a being whose essence is its existence, it would be unique, there could only be one such being, in all else essence and existence are distinct.

God. (Read the rest of the article above to see how some, e.g John Wippel, disagree and think that essence and existence are indistinguishable in reality.)

On essence and existence, these things are ideas. To me, ideas are, as I have said so many times, concepts within our minds. I am a conceptual nominalist, so abstract ideas like essence and existence have no ontic reality. That is to say, if all sentient beings (humans) were to die, then all such abstract ideas would die with them. They don’t exist outside of conceiving minds.

Aquinas was a Moderate Realist so he will be able to argue himself to such positions because of his axiomatic starting point. However, is such realism truly self-evident, axiomatic? I would argue not. Either way, it underwrites his premises. Who is right might depend on where they start.

As Wiki states:

Moderate realism (also called immanent realism) is a position in the debate on the metaphysics of universals that holds that there is no realm in which universals exist (in opposition to Platonic realism who asserts the existence of abstract objects), nor do they really exist within particulars as universals, but rather universals really exist within particulars as particularised, and multiplied.

Moderate realism is opposed to both exaggerated realism (such as the theory of Platonic forms) and nominalism. Nominalists deny the existence of universals altogether, even as particularised and multiplied within particulars.

Aristotle espoused a form of moderate realism as did Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus (cf. Scotist realism).^[1] Moderate realism is anti-realist about abstract objects, just like conceptualism is (their difference being that conceptualism denies the mind-independence of universals, while moderate realism does not).^[2]

That is to say that those universals (redness, man-ness) simply do not exist at all outside of the mind. For Aquinas, they do really exist, these abstracted forms, these essences, in the particular thing. But what does that really mean? That sounds fine, but how does it really work?

For me, all beings are different, but we mentally categorise them for human pragmatism. I have written extensively on this, using the example of the species problem, and using this image:

This, as applied to species, shows that species don’t have essences, and don’t have categorical boundaries set in abstract stone. We, technically, should treat all organisms as individuals, as particulars alone that happen to have similar properties but that are not identical. Aquinas treats them as analogical, each being similar but different, but those similarities are essences that really exist in the particular. There is the essence of a tiger and of a mouse. But, for me, which type of mouse – do we now have to break up this mousenesses into yet smaller or different essences? And what happens around the blurred evolutionary transition between non-mouse and mouse? I can see the draw of this approach of realism for pragmatic, categorical purposes, but it simply doesn’t hold up in nature.

In other words, the “whatness” of any given thing is what is up for grabs. You and I may disagree over what a hero is, but also the exact essence of a homo sapiens (as opposed to a homo heidelbergensis). And these whatnesses would have to take into account those particulars on the extreme that we would still include in the term homo sapiens or man, such as a badly malformed foetus, or an unconscious transgender person or some other entity (as a philosophical word, not to belittle transgender people!) that doesn’t fit neatly into the idea of natural kinds and essences.

Of course, it is God who knows everything; we are merely imperfect epistemological entities:

The epistemology of Aquinas is thus a moderate realism, a via media between exaggerated or naive realism, and idealism. We attain to a reality itself independent of our act of knowing, and in doing so we become possessed of knowledge which is true, but inadequate. The process of psychological elaboration which goes on in the mind limits the field of knowledge, but does not disfigure it.

To me, though, Aquinas fails in showing, at least as far as my very limited Thomistic reading is concerned, the viability of an essence as an ontic entity. We have properties, for sure. And many entities have similar groups of properties. So what?

To say that God is the only entity whose existence and essence are bound together necessarily is to assume “essence” makes any sense. I simply deny the universality and coherence of essences. Of course, that’s not even to get onto the sticky subject of existence conditions of properties. Both existence and essence are very much terms to be argued over.

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Morality as Evolved; What about God?

Last updated on: April 26, 2019 at 10:58 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

I am first going to furnish you with an excerpt from Robert Sapolsky’s Behave [UK here] before discussing the content within a theological context. Of course, what Sapolsky has to say is nothing new or groundbreaking, but it serves s a good introduction to the topic.

AGAIN WITH BABIES AND ANIMALS

Much as infants demonstrate the rudiments of hierarchical and Us/Them thinking, they possess building blocks of moral reasoning as well. For starters, infants have the bias concerning commission versus omission. In one clever study, six-month-olds watched a scene containing two of the same objects, one blue and one red; repeatedly, the scene would show a person picking the blue object. Then, one time, the red one is picked. The kid becomes interested, looks more, breathes faster, showing that this seems discrepant. Now, the scene shows two of the same objects, one blue, one a different color. In each repetition of the scene, a person picks the one that is not blue (its color changes with each repetition). Suddenly, the blue one is picked. The kid isn’t particularly interested. “He always picks the blue one” is easier to comprehend than “He never picks the blue one.” Commission is weightier.—

Infants and toddlers also have hints of a sense of justice, as shown by Kiley Hamlin of the University of British Columbia, and Paul Bloom and Karen Wynn of Yale. Six- to twelve-month-olds watch a circle moving up a hill. A nice triangle helps to push it. A mean square blocks it. Afterward the infants can reach for a triangle or a square. They choose the triangle.* Do infants prefer nice beings, or shun mean ones? Both. Nice triangles were preferred over neutral shapes, which were preferred over mean squares.

Such infants advocate punishing bad acts. A kid watches puppets, one good, one bad (sharing versus not). The child is then presented with the puppets, each sitting on a pile of sweets. Who should lose a sweet? The bad puppet. Who should gain one? The good puppet.

Remarkably, toddlers even assess secondary punishment. The good and bad puppets then interact with two additional puppets, who can be nice or bad. And whom did kids prefer of those second-layer puppets? Those who were nice to nice puppets and those who punished mean ones.

Other primates also show the beginnings of moral judgments. Things started with a superb 2003 paper by Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan.— Capuchin monkeys were trained in a task: A human gives them a mildly interesting small object—a pebble. The human then extends her hand palm up, a capuchin

begging gesture. If the monkey puts the pebble in her hand, there’s a food reward. In other words, the animals learned how to buy food.

Now there are two capuchins, side by side. Each gets a pebble. Each gives it to the human. Each gets a grape, very rewarding.

Now change things. Both monkeys pay their pebble. Monkey 1 gets a grape. But monkey 2 gets some cucumber, which blows compared with grapes— capuchins prefer grapes to cucumber 90 percent of the time. Monkey 2 was shortchanged.

And monkey 2 would then typically fling the cucumber at the human or bash around in frustration. Most consistently, they wouldn’t give the pebble the next time. As the Nature paper was entitled, “Monkeys reject unequal pay.”

This response has since been demonstrated in various macaque monkey species, crows, ravens, and dogs (where the dog’s “work” would be shaking her paw).*—

Subsequent work by Brosnan, de Waal, and others fleshed out this phenomenon further:—

• One criticism of the original study was that maybe capuchins refused to work for cucumbers because grapes were visible, regardless of whether the other guy was getting paid in grapes.

But no—the phenomenon required unfair payment.

• Both animals are getting grapes, then one gets switched to cucumber. What’s key—that the other guy is still getting grapes, or that I no longer am? The former—if doing the study with a single monkey, switching from grapes to cucumbers would not evoke refusal. Nor would it if both monkeys got cucumbers.

• Across the various species, males were more likely than females to reject “lower pay”; dominant animals were more likely than subordinates to reject.

• It’s about the work—give one monkey a free grape, the other free cucumber, and the latter doesn’t get pissed.

• The closer in proximity the two animals are, the more likely the one getting cucumber is to go on strike.

• Finally, rejection of unfair pay isn’t seen in species that are solitary (e.g., orangutans) or have minimal social cooperation (e.g., owl monkeys).

Okay, very impressive—other social species show hints of a sense of justice, reacting negatively to unequal reward. But this is worlds away from juries awarding money to plaintiffs harmed by employers. Instead it’s self-interest —“This isn’t fair; I’m getting screwed.”

How about evidence of a sense of fairness in the treatment of another individual? Two studies have examined this in a chimp version of the Ultimatum Game. Recall the human version—in repeated rounds, player 1 in a pair decides how money is divided between the two of them. Player 2 is powerless in the decision making but, if unhappy with the split, can refuse, and no one gets any money. In other words, player 2 can forgo immediate reward to punish selfish player 1. As we saw in chapter 10, Player 2s tend to accept 60:40 splits.

In the chimp version, chimp 1, the proposer, has two tokens. One indicates that each chimp gets two grapes. The other indicates that the proposer gets three grapes, the partner only one. The proposer chooses a token and passes it to chimp 2, who then decides whether to pass the token to the human grape dispenser. In other words, if chimp 2 thinks chimp 1 is being unfair, no one gets grapes.

In one such study, Michael Tomasello (a frequent critic of de Waal—stay tuned) at the Max Planck Institutes in Germany, found no evidence of chimp fairness—the proposer always chose, and the partner always accepted unfair splits.— De Waal and Brosnan did the study in more ethologically valid conditions and reported something different: proposer chimps tended toward equitable splits, but if they could give the token directly to the human (robbing chimp 2 of veto power), they’d favor unfair splits. So chimps will opt for fairer splits—but only when there is a downside to being unfair.

Sometimes other primates are fair when it’s at no cost to themselves. Back to capuchin monkeys. Monkey 1 chooses whether both he and the other guy get marshmallows or it’s a marshmallow for him and yucky celery for the other guy. Monkeys tended to choose marshmallows for the other guy.* Similar “other- regarding preference” was shown with marmoset monkeys, where the first individual got nothing and merely chose whether the other guy got a cricket to eat (of note, a number of studies have failed to find other-regarding preference in chimps).—

Really interesting evidence for a nonhuman sense of justice comes in a small side study in a Brosnan/de Waal paper. Back to the two monkeys getting cucumbers for work. Suddenly one guy gets shifted to grapes. As we saw, the

one still getting the cucumber refuses to work. Fascinatingly, the grape mogul often refuses as well.

What is this? Solidarity? “I’m no strike-breaking scab”? Self-interest, but with an atypically long view about the possible consequences of the cucumber victim’s resentment? Scratch an altruistic capuchin and a hypocritical one bleeds? In other words, all the questions raised by human altruism.

Given the relatively limited reasoning capacities of monkeys, these findings support the importance of social intuitionism. De Waal perceives even deeper implications—the roots of human morality are older than our cultural institutions, than our laws and sermons. Rather than human morality being spiritually transcendent (enter deities, stage right), it transcends our species boundaries. [my emphasis]

Indeed, the Frans de Waal experiment can be seen here:

What do these things tell us? Well, within the context of primates and other social animals, the foundations of morality are not only there, evident to see, but they are evolved. Their functionality for sociality and social cohesion are clear to see. And this is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the subject of the evolution of morality and morality in other species is concerned.

But what about God?

This is where you can see so many theists have an issue with evolution. This is where evolution gets rejected because so many things that have theological purchase, things like morality, that we can see have been clearly involved for their functional purpose become problematic for the theist for these very reasons.

The theist really and has two options. Firstly, they can reject evolution outright. Secondly, they can be theistic evolutionists. Obviously, from a naturalistic and atheistic point of view, the theistic evolutionist is a much more preferable form of the theist. At least they are somewhat reasonable and open to logic, science and data. And yet, still, one wonders how they deal with the subject of evolved personality traits. For example, Steven Pinker’s superb How the Mind Works, a great synopsis of the evolutionary underpinnings and processes behind everything to do with our personality and minds, must still be a very difficult book for a theistic evolutionist to read.

Of course, if you deny evolution, none of this is a problem. However, the real problem is that you deny evolution and all of this data and science still exists. It doesn’t suddenly disappear. Burying your head in the sand doesn’t make the rest of the world disappear; it just means you only get to see granules of sand in front of your eyes. And nothing else. The world becomes a very one-dimensional place when you do this; there is no benefit the person doing this in terms of understanding the world around them.

God is the Foundation of Objective Morality

Goodness me, I’ve written enough on the fact that the term “objective” doesn’t make any sense, particularly in the context of conceptual nominalism. Indeed, what we have here is a two-pronged attack on God. And by “God” we can mean objective morality or any other similarly evolved traits that humans have that also have theological importance.

If morality is evolved due to its functionality and usefulness, then the grounds to morality are… their functionality and their usefulness. Morality isn’t underwritten by God; God has no explanatory use here, both in terms of causality and moral philosophy.

As humans have built on these foundations of morality, both aspects of intuition and reasoning, using the many parts of our brain that Sapolsky spells out in minute detail throughout his book, we create an intricate framework of morality that gets woven into our culture and our relationships with each other, and even with other species. But the core foundation of this morality is it functionalism evolved within parts of the brain.

As Sapolsky continues:

Many moral philosophers believe not only that moral judgment is built on reasoning but also that it should be. This is obvious to fans of Mr. Spock, since the emotional component of moral intuitionism just introduces sentimentality, self-interest, and parochial biases. But one remarkable finding counters this.

Relatives are special. Chapter 10 attests to that. Any social organism would tell you so. Joseph Stalin thought so concerning Pavlik Morozov ratting out his father. As do most American courts, where there is either de facto or de jure resistance to making someone testify against their own parent or child. Relatives are special. But not to people lacking social intuitionism. As noted, people with vmPFC damage make extraordinarily practical, unemotional moral decisions. And in the process they do something that everyone, from clonal yeast to Uncle Joe to the Texas Rules of Criminal Evidence considers morally suspect: they advocate harming kin as readily as strangers in an “Is it okay to sacrifice one person to save five?” scenario.

Emotion and social intuition are not some primordial ooze that gums up that human specialty of moral reasoning. Instead, they anchor some of the few moral judgments that most humans agree upon.

Which is to say that both reasoning and intuition are important, yes. Anyone who has read around the subject, from Kahneman to Damasio knows this. What I find important here to the context of this piece is that there are functional reasons as to why intuitive morality evolved – for example, it profits the survival of kin more likely than non-kin (think the selfish gene). This is hardcoded into the brain and if you damage those intuitionist parts of the brain, the subject then makes moral decisions that, purely rationally, do not favour kin over non-kin.

The brain, and the way it has evolved, is key, then, to understanding morality. And that is a truth many philosophers don’t like. And a truth that theologians really struggle with.

My next piece will be on how theistic evolutionists deal with the above. Or how they don’t, really.

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Psychology and Moral Philosophy: An Integration

Last updated on: January 11, 2019 at 8:53 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

Last night, I gave a talk to the Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub with fellow ATP writer, Alan Duval. We had a great time and I can’t thank Pompey Skeptics enough (especially as they donated all proceeds to my appeal – totally brilliant of them). It was great to meet Phil Rimmer, a commenter here at ATP, who came down to see the talk. Awesome, and just a shame the venue closed after the talk and we couldn’t grab a beer! Damn!

The talk consisted of Alan and me splicing our views over an hour, talking about the different philosophical approaches to morality (as in the big three: consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics) and how these translate into psychology.

We first talked about building philosophical frameworks up from the bottom rather than top-down, as I set out here. This means working out what the basic building bricks of philosophical ideas are. In other words, what are abstract ideas? As per my personhood talk and views, it comes down to expounding conceptual nominalism. Abstract ideas only exist in our heads. Without any sentient life forms on earth, the ideas of a hero or a chair, or indeed morality, would die. They do not exist outside of our minds.

Don’t worry, God doesn’t help here since claiming God solves the problem simply moves abstracta into another mind, the mind of God.

Excuse the missing brick.

Given this, and showing the strengths and weaknesses of all the big three, we concluded that the big three, on their own and individually, don’t really cover the necessary ground, although they have their functional use. From an action point of view, consequentialism does seem to have a benefit of having a non-derivative value currency in some kind of satisfaction / happiness / pleasure / lack of pain. This is a decent axiom from which we can start. Happiness is self-evidently good, it seems. But as a whole system, it’s still not perfect.

Alan, in looking at the work of Schwarz, Maslow and Kohlberg, equated each philosophical outlook with a psychological and moral development in people, as you can see above.

In the meantime, we dismissed Divine Command Theory and Natural Law (upheld by various theists) and established how psychology could account for these moral systems from an individual and then societal point of view.

A more complex form of which can be seen here:

I really like the way it fits into Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:

We look at individual actions, learn from them, and formulate rules that knit together societies. When these work well, they allow for safety and security, out of which blossoms self-actualisation.

In a sense, this doffs a cap to Richard Carrier and others who have said that consequentialism derives to deontology, deontology to consequentialism, and both to virtue ethics. See Carrier’s excellent piece: “Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same“.

On Carrier’s piece is the following image:

My conclusions, in general, were:

Morality does not exist outside of our minds
We construct it with a psychology evolved to fit our environment
…both the physical and the social
Morality is built on intentions, empathy and rationality
…and good knowledge of the world
But, there is no perfect model, so there are grey areas.
Animals have it to differing degrees.
It is evolutionarily beneficial – empathy, consolation, prosocial tendencies, reciprocity and fairness
In order to set out a moral framework, you need to carefully set out a goal, a vision for the world

That covers a lot of ground. The last bit is important. I have often said the following:

So, what is an ought? Well, oughts should be seen in their larger context. All too often, we use language sloppily in a way that we take linguistic shortcuts. For example, if I say “I ought to change the oil in my car engine” then most people understand what I mean by implication and inference. This this is actually an apodosis, the part of a conditional sentence that usually starts with then. The problem is, we are missing the protasis, which is the first part of the conditional sentence that usually starts with an if. This is because we are clever enough to make the correct inference and work out what the speaker is meaning.

However, if we were being specific and accurate, we would include the protasis. In this case, the protasis would be “If I want my car engine to work well, then I ought to change the oil in my car engine.” Without the protasis, the sentence “I ought to change the oil in my car engine” is essentially meaningless. This is because you can place anything as the protasis and completely change the overall meaning of the sentence or, indeed, render the apodosis incorrect. In this case, if I said “If, as a scientist, I am testing how well engines work without oil in them” then adding the apodosis, “then I ought to change the oil in the car engine” will not make sense, and the whole sentence is problematic.

Thus the point to make here is that, although we often do it and can make sense of it, if we are to be precise, then we should always include the protasis in a conditional statement.

The problem is that when we make moral proclamations involving prescriptive morality concerning the world, that one should do such and such, then we often miss out the protasis. The statement is oddly devoid of a goal. If we want this kind of world to eventualise or maintain, then we should do X. All too often, we hear “You should do X” devoid of any clear idea of what the goal actually is.

The first step in working out a sound moral framework is to work out the sort of world you want to live in, a process itself laden with moral dimensions. Then you will start constructing morality that will eventually look like the sort of pyramid set out above, if it is successful. Morality is one of those tools that regulates social interactions and is functionally necessary for social beings to create communities and societies.

End result? We both had a great time, stimulating a fabulous Q & A (my normal favourite part where we go round the houses talking about anything. In fact, it was suggested a bring a talk where I have no talk, and we just do a massive Q & A!). Thanks to organisers and all who came, and very much to Alan for making a great double team.

Races Do Not “Exist” Even Though They Might “Exist”.

Last updated on: December 30, 2018 at 8:41 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

Yup, you guessed it, we’re gonna return to the Sorites Paradox. Sorry to bore you. This comment came up on the older post “IQ: Using Race Divisively” and I thought I would go over some points I have previously made:

You are clearly not very bright because you are so foolish as to believe that if there are not absolute, crystal clear dividing lines between categories, then categories do not exist. Talk to a biologist some time. Even species divisions are not always absolute. Are you thus going to tell me there’s no such thing as species?

The races of humanity exist. They have differing average IQs. This has profound real-world implications. You are not very intelligent. All of these are true. Get used to them.

Of course, it depends what we mean by “exist” when we might say “the races of humanity exist”. Many of you might have read the introductory stuff here and you can skip to the end, if you desire.

The Sorites Paradox

My favourite philosophical thought experiment, if you can call it that, and as many of my readers might know of me, is the Sorites Paradox. It can be defined as follows:

The sorites paradox^[1] (sometimes known as the paradox of the heap) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.^[2] A typical formulation involves a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Under the assumption that removing a single grain does not turn a heap into a non-heap, the paradox is to consider what happens when the process is repeated enough times: is a single remaining grain still a heap? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?^[3]

The paradox arises in this way:

The word “sorites” derives from the Greek word for heap.^[4] The paradox is so named because of its original characterization, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus.^[5] The paradox goes as follows: consider a heap of sand from which grains are individually removed. One might construct the argument, using premises, as follows:^[3]

1000000 grains of sand is a heap of sand (Premise 1)

A heap of sand minus one grain is still a heap. (Premise 2)

Repeated applications of Premise 2 (each time starting with one fewer grain) eventually forces one to accept the conclusion that a heap may be composed of just one grain of sand.^[6]). Read (1995) observes that “the argument is itself a heap, or sorites, of steps of modus ponens“:^[7]

1000000 grains is a heap.

If 1000000 grains is a heap then 999999 grains is a heap.

So 999999 grains is a heap.

If 999999 grains is a heap then 999998 grains is a heap.

So 999998 grains is a heap.

If …

… So 1 grain is a heap.

Categorising stuff

We love to use categories. That’s a blue flower, that’s a red car, that’s an adult, that’s a child. It’s how we navigate reality in a practical sense – it provides our conceptual map. However, you shouldn’t confuse the map with the terrain. Essentially (good word choice), we make up labels to represent a number of different properties. A cat has these properties, a dog these. Red has these properties, blue these. Often we agree on this labelling, but sometimes we don’t. What constitutes a hero? A chair? Is a tree stump a chair?

The problem occurs when we move between categories. It is at these times that we realise the simplicity of the categories shows weakness in the system.

You reach eighteen years of age. You are able to vote. You are now classed as an adult. You are allowed to buy alcoholic drinks (in the UK). But there is barely any discernible difference in you, as a person, physically and mentally, from 17 years, 364 days, 11 hours, 59 minutes, 59 seconds, and you 1 second later.

However, we decide to define that second change at midnight as differentiating the two yous and seeing you move from child (adolescent) to adult. These categories are arbitrary in where we exactly draw the line. Some countries choose sixteen, some younger, some older. These are conceptual constructs that allow us to navigate about a continuum of time. You can look at a five-year-old and the same person at twenty-eight and clearly see a difference. But that five-year-old and the same person one second later? There is no discernible difference.

And yet it is pragmatically useful for us to categorise, otherwise things like underage sex and drinking would take place with wild abandon, perhaps. Sixteen for the age of consent is, though, rather arbitrary. Why not five seconds later? Four days? Three and a half years?

Speciation is exactly the same. There is no real time where a population of organisms actually transforms into a new species. Because species is a human conceptual construct that does not exist objectively. We name things homo sapiens sapiens but cannot define exactly where speciation occurred. In one sense, it does not occur. In another, if you look at vastly different places on the continuum, it does (at least in our minds).

This is a version of the Sorites Paradox.

As I have shared several times, why not again? This image sums it up with aplomb:

Races

In philosophy, there is a position called (conceptual) nominalism, which is set against (Platonic) realism. This conceptual nominalism, as I adhere to, denies in some (or all) cases the existence of abstracts. These categories we invent don’t exist (a word that itself needs clear defining), at least not outside of our heads. Thus species do not exist as objective categories. We invent them, but if all people who knew about species suddenly died and information about them was lost, then so too would be lost the concept and categorisation.

When we look at two very different parts of a continuum we find it easy to say those things are different and are of different categories, but when we look in finer detail, this falls apart. There is a fuzzy logic at play.

Species do not exist. Well, they do in our heads. When we agree about them. And only then so we can nicely label pictures in books, or in our heads.

In the same way, races do not exist in any objective sense. We can conceptually call them into existence for whatever reason we might want. We could do it to be racist, or for pragmatic reasons, or we could choose not to conceptually create the category of race because it might be counter-productive. To choose to create race categories appears to be, for the most part, a spurious pastime. What remains to be said, or asked, is why such a person bothers with the race crusade at all? I could vilify autistic people, or quadriplegics, as not offering something or another to society, or being different, less than, more than etc. But I don’t because I am a compassionate human.

We could further categorise into hair colour: blonde, ginger, brunette and so on, and attach value (superiority or inferiority) to such categories. Why bother? Well, we do so for hair colour in merely differentiating the looks of one person against another for pragmatic usage.

As a child, I was ginger and I was bullied/teased on account of this, at some points pretty damagingly so. Outside of that pragmatic usage, such distinctions are often misused for purposes of in-group / out-group castigation.

Whether or not we do such categorisation comes down to the benefits or negative aspects of so doing: the consequences. Whether or not we should do something is, after all, a moral question. The challenge is that is is a very natural process to do so, to point out and indicate differences. It is a way of understanding the world that humans love all too much. We have a habit of putting people, things, plants, animals and anything else in boxes. It isn’t always so beneficial, though.

In conclusion, race doesn’t exist out there, but only in the mind. It’s up to you or us how we define it, and then, after that, how we use that definition.

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Kalam, Causality and God

Last updated on: December 22, 2018 at 1:11 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

The other day, a Christian commenter posted a series of comments concerning the Kalam (appearing to pertain to my book Did God Create the Universe from Nothing?). I would like to take them to task in considering some of those comments, which include:

“It is… a mere assertion… that EVERYTHING which begins to exist has a cause… This can be called a ‘simple induction by enumeration to a generalization.’ …”
Can anyone give an example of something physical in the universe that began to exist did not have a cause

and

It is impossible for something to begin to exist without a cause.

and

The cause for your existence is due to your parents.

and

The universe began to exist. Its called the big bang.
It is impossible for something to begin to exist without a cause. Just because you don’t know the cause doesn’t mean there was not a cause.

and

If something could come into existence without a cause then that is the end of science. It has nothing to do with the laws of nature.

God does not need a cause. He has always existed.

The naturalist has these options:

The universe popped into existence uncaused.
The universe was caused by some other non-God cause, somehow.
The universe is part of an infinite regress of causality. (See the chapter by Dr James East on this very point, in my book)
The universe is a brute fact, a necessary entity, just as God is claimed to be. This is a more attractive proposition than God as per Ockham’s Razor. (I will create a post to talk about this).

What we need to think about first here is causality. Indeed, this whole argument is one over causality: cause and effect. Whilst cause and effect might be at face value a very simple thing, just the term “cause” can be tricky. Let me make reference to my book in answering this, where much of the next content comes from.

With this in mind, let us look at causality and the problems with it. Let me analogise to make the point as clear as possible.

Smith is driving along the road over the speed limit. He is tired due to a heavy work schedule and a deadline which meant a lack of sleep the night before and is late for a meeting. One of his favourite songs comes on the radio and he starts singing along to it. On the pavement (sidewalk) a drunk man falls over into a bin which the Borough Council had just put in place to improve the cleanliness of the town. The bin is knocked off its stand and rolls into the road. Smith sees the bin late as his attention is distracted. He swerves, to avoid it. At the same time, a boy is trying to cross the road without looking. Smith is swerving into him and has to reverse his swerve significantly the other way, hitting a pothole in the poorly maintained road. This sends the car out of his control and onto the pavement. Jones, who had been walking by, slips on some soapy water draining from the carwash he is walking past. Whilst Jones is picking himself up, Smith’s car mounts the pavement, hits Jones, and kills him instantly. What is the cause of Jones’ death?

This is a very difficult, but standard causal question. The universe is not an isolation of one cause and one effect. It is a matrix of cause and effect with each effect being causal further down in something like the continuum. One could say that the impact of the car on Jones’ head kills him. But even then, at what nanosecond of impact, what degree of the force killed him? This is arbitrarily cutting off the causal continuum at 1, half or quarter of a second before the effect (Jones’ death). Having said that, the cause could be said to be the lack of oxygen to the brain, or the destruction of his vital organs. We could also accuse the bin, the drunk or anything else as being a cause, because without each of these, the final effect would not have taken place.[i]

As a result, I would posit that the cause of Jones’ death is one long continuum which cannot be arbitrarily sliced up temporally.^[ii] As such, it stretches back to, say, the Big Bang—the start of the causal chain. In terms of free will, we call this the causal circumstance. Because the universe is one big causal soup, I would claim that any effect would be the makeup of the universe at any one point, like a snapshot. This makeup that leads to any given effect cannot be sliced up arbitrarily but is the entire connected matrix of ‘causes and effect’ (for want of a better term) since the Big Bang.

In other words, there is only one cause. The universe at the Big Bang (or similar).

If I am picking up a cup of tea to drink from it now, then we could just look at a few seconds before this as to the cause. Perhaps it was just my intention. But how about the notion that my parents introduced me to tea, and all those instances of tea drinking which came from that that now enforce my intentions? What if tea had not evolved? What if my grandparents had not given birth to my parents, and them to me? What if humanity had not evolved? What if the Earth had not harboured life? Without all of these, I would not have picked up my cup of tea. They are all relevant (and all the bits in between, and connecting them to other parts of the matrix) to my drinking tea now.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett uses another example about the French Foreign Legion that he himself adapted from elsewhere to illustrate problems with a basic notion of causality, of A simplistically causing B:

Not that deadlocks must always be breakable. We ought to look with equanimity on the prospect that sometimes circumstances will fail to pinpoint a single “real cause” of an event, no matter how hard we seek. A case in point is the classic law school riddle:

Everybody in the French Foreign Legion outpost hates Fred, and wants him dead. During the night before Fred’s trek across the desert, Tom poisons the water in his canteen. Then, Dick, not knowing of Tom’s intervention, pours out the (poisoned) water and replaces it with sand. Finally, Harry comes along and pokes holes in the canteen, so that the “water” will slowly run out. Later, Fred awakens and sets out on his trek, provisioned with his canteen. Too late he finds his canteen is nearly empty, but besides, what remains is sand, not water, not even poisoned water. Fred dies of thirst. Who caused his death?

This thought experiment defends the thesis that causality is, at times, impossible to untangle or define. I would take this one very large step further in saying that the causality of such an effect, of any effect, is traceable back to the first cause itself: the Big Bang or whatever creation event you ascribe to.^[iii]

So the causality of things happening now is that initial singularity or creation event. As I will show later, nothing has begun to exist, and no cause has begun to exist, other than that first cause—the Big Bang singularity.

Let me show this as follows with another example of such causality. In this example, the term causal circumstance is the causal situation that has causal effect on the object—from every air molecule to every aspect of physical force:

Imagine there are 5 billiard balls A–E and nothing else. These came to exist at point t₀ with an ‘introductory force’. At each point t₁, t₂ etc, every ball hits another ball. At point t₅, B hits E at 35 degrees sending it towards C. Craig’s own point about causality seems to be this: the cause for B hitting E at 35 degrees is the momentum and energy generated in B as it hits E. That is his ‘efficient cause’. My point is this: the cause of B hitting E is at t₀. No cause has begun to exist or has been created out of nothing. The causes transform—what is called transformative creation. So the cause of B hitting E is:

B firing off at t₀ and hitting A at t₁, the causal circumstance meaning it rebounds off A to hit D at t₂, meaning the causal circumstance rendering it inevitable that it hits A again at t₃… and then it hits E at t₅ at 35 degrees.

The cause is the casual circumstance at t₅. This is identical to the causal circumstance in free will discussions—that determinism entails the cause of an action to the first cause of the Big Bang. The causal circumstance is everything up until the moment t₅ as well as all the factors at the moment just prior to t₅ (at t₄). Craig is incorrect, in my opinion, in saying that the cause of B hitting E is the immediate isolated efficient cause just before t₅ (t₄).

Now, in this example, the term transformative creation pops up. This is something which will be examined in the next objection. In summary, this example shows that one cannot arbitrarily quantise causality; one cannot cut it up into discrete chunks since it is, in reality, one long, continual causal chain, unbroken. Even the word “chain” is problematic because it is linear in sense, and causality is more like a matrix (or causal soup as I earlier said!).

What this amounts to is the notion that there is only one cause, and even this is open for debate. The creation event sets in motion one long, interconnected continuum of causality. What I am implying here, then, is that there is only one effect. This means that the idea that “everything” or “every effect” as it can be synonymously denoted is incoherent since there is only one effect—an ever-morphing matrix of causality. Let us see how this changes the syllogism:

1) Everything which begins to exist has the universe as the causal condition for its existence.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore, the universe had the universe as a causal condition for its existence.

As you can easily see, the conclusion is highly problematic. It is nonsensical and seems to insinuate that the universe is self-caused. There is only one cause and this is the universe and can hardly be applied to itself. One cannot make a generalised rule, which is what the inductively asserted first premise is as we have discussed, from a singular event/object and then apply the rule to that very event/object. This is entirely circular and even incoherent. Causality itself renders the KCA problematic.

Let me emphasise that point: you cannot make a generalised rule that “everything which begins to exist has cause for its existence” when everything is merely one thing. And you cannot apply that rule to itself.

In exactly the same way that we cannot untangle or slice up causality into discrete parts, we cannot also delineate objects, and this leads me on to the second objection which closely matches the one just elucidated – that of nominalism as it pertains to the KCA.

[i] Personally, I find JL Mackie’s INUS conditions (insufficient but non-redundant parts of a condition which is itself unnecessary but sufficient for the occurrence of the effect) an interesting concept within the discipline of causality.

[ii] One could run down a rabbit hole here in assessing (partial) moral responsibility in light of being part of a causal chain, as can be seen in the work of determinists and compatibilists in the free will debate.

[iii] As I have hinted at in the previous note, this has ramifications upon ideas of moral responsibility. As this is not the remit for this book, I would refer the reader to the excellent Living Without Free Will by Derk Pereboom.

Politics as Moral Philosophy

Last updated on: November 6, 2018 at 8:20 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

Generally, the study of morality is split into three components: descriptive morality, meta-ethics and normative morality. Normally philosophers replace the term ‘morality’ with ‘ethics’. Descriptive ethics is concerned with what people empirically believe, morally speaking. Normative ethics (which can be called prescriptive ethics) investigates questions of what people should believe. Meta-ethics is more philosophical still in attempting to define what moral theories and ethical terms actually refer to. Or,

What do different cultures actually think is right? (descriptive)
How should people act, morally speaking? (normative)
What do right and ought actually mean? (meta-ethics)

Morality, as the term will be used here, will generally be understood as: “normatively to refer to a code of conduct that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational persons.”[i]

The second important term to attempt to unravel is objective. This is a more difficult term to define than one may think. Usually it means something that is independent of an agent’s mind, or mind-independent. This is the understanding I will use here for the sake of argument. Thus objective morality refers to facts about what constitutes moral behavior, and these facts lie in the nature of the agent’s action, regardless of cultural and individual opinion.

One hugely important question at this point concerns the existence of properties such as “is an abstract idea.” This is important because theists end up arguing at only skin depth, at the veneer of philosophy. Whether an atheist has the right to make moral judgments is a question that has as its basis much more fundamental meta-ethical and metaphysical philosophy. What theism and theists rely on is some form of (Platonic) realism such that there is a realm where abstract ideas and forms exist. This is not immediately, or even after some critical analysis, apparent. What are rights, moral laws or morality actually made of? What is their ontology? What are the properties of these abstract ideas? The conceptualist (a form of nominalism, the position that denies the existence of universal abstract ideas in some way) claims, for example, that abstract ideas like morality are concepts in each individual conceiver’s head. Thus objective morality is potentially a non-starter or requires a more befitting definition. Now the philosophy gets very in-depth here, but is actually critically important. It is easy to say atheists have no ground for objective morality and that theists do. It is a lot harder to show how objective morality exists in some kind of mind-independent reality. Even God can be argued to be an abstraction (since he apparently has infinite qualities, a concept that has no actual reality).

Now, all of my regular readers will know this very well; or, at least, they will know that this is my approach to abstracts and thus morality.

So, for me, morality is an abstract concept or framework of concepts that exist(s) in our minds. Usually, we consider morality to be about individual actions and how they might impact on others.

Politics is, I argue, this individual approach merely on a societal level. When we talk about morality in a generalised sense, we are invariably talking about normative ethics – what one (as an individual) should do. When we talk about politics, we talk about what one (a politician or a country) should do in the context of policy. This policy then has an outcome or consequence in affecting others.

This seems as clear as day to me, but I have had some push back before in claiming that politics is morality and moral philosophy.

What should a politician do? What policies should a government enact in a given scenario? This is obviously moral philosophy, writ large.

Given this, then, it seems incumbent upon those discussing politics and policies and governance to have a working knowledge of moral philosophy. More than that, I think it is necessary for those people, and necessary for politicians, to set out their moral philosophy first. Because their moral philosophy will define their political and policy choices.

I remember watching The Big Questions on the BBC (upon which I have featured myself), the philosophy, religion and politics discussion programme, when it topic was torture. The whole panel were discussing torture on the veneer, discussing whether it worked in a given context. The discussion was, in all honesty, utterly pointless because no one had set out their moral philosophy. One’s approach to whether torture is acceptable or good is based on two things: what your moral philosophy is and what the empirical evidence is concerning the efficacy of torture. That two-pronged approach is fundamental to worthwhile discussions on, say, torture.

In the good old days (!), UK politicians used to go to university and learn PEP – politics, economics and philosophy – and for good reason.

With regard to politics, the same is true. What is your moral philosophy, and what are the empirical evidences and outcomes of a given policy?

Morality is, I would argue, a goal-oriented philosophy. You need to set out what your goals are before setting out your moral propositions or frameworks. This is doubly important for politics. What sort of country or world do we want to live in?

Do we want to live in a sort of dystopian future with little of no biodiversity (a la Total Recall or similar), or do we want to live in harmony with a biodiverse nature? Sorting this basic goal out will then massively inform policy-making. This, in turn, will bring about discussions of the moral value of humans against other animals, and whether securing the health of other ecosystems itself secures the long-term health and future of humanity, etc. etc.

To conclude, politics is a subcategory of moral philosophy, but not enough people know their moral philosophy and end up doing politics without firm foundations. They build castles in the air.

[i] Bernard Gert. “The Definition of Morality,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/ (accessed July 20, 2013)

Human Rights Don’t Exist until We Construct and Codify Them

Last updated on: September 29, 2018 at 2:25 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

Human rights don’t exist. By this, I mean, as I so often state, they do not have ontic existence – they do not exist outside of our minds. Like all abstract ideas, for a conceptual nominalist like myself, the existence of such mental entities (labels, morality and so on) is entirely in our minds.

This is an article I have been meaning to write for a long time.

I, and most other humans, often talk about human rights as if they exist as objective entities. However, this is lazy language. They, like any aspect of language itself, are arrived at by consensus. When we agree on the meaning of any word, we codify that by putting it in a dictionary.

Actually, it’s even more descriptive than that. When humans use language – words and whatever spelling we choose often enough – dictionary compilers recognise a certain level of frequency and deem a word and its spelling common enough to be included in the dictionary. For example, the word “gamification” recently made it in after being coined and utilised enough that it reached a tipping point of acceptance into codification.

It’s similar with abstract concepts like human rights. We think and observe and take part in society and then we make moral proclamations. I don’t know, something like these generic ones:

The right to life
The right to liberty and freedom
The right to the pursuit of happiness
The right to live your life free of discrimination
The right to control what happens to your own body and to make medical decisions for yourself
The right to freely exercise your religion and practice your religious beliefs without fear of being prosecuted for your beliefs
The right to be free from prejudice on the basis of race, gender, national origin, color, age or sex
The right to grow old
The right to a fair trial and due process of the law
The right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment
The right to be free from torture
The right to be free from slavery
The right to freedom of speech
The right to freely associate with whomever you like and to join groups of which you’d like to be a part.
The right to freedom of thought
The right not to be prosecuted from your thoughts

You might want to get more specific still.

If I thought up these ideas but no one else did, or no one else agreed, they are not really human rights in any pragmatic sense, and they certainly aren’t universal. You could argue that there is a set of human rights that exist in some kind of ether or Platonic realm of truth. Perhaps in God. Of course, the Bible contravenes even some of the most basic human rights of, say, the UN (that seems infinitely more sensible and moral in its/their proclamations). So there is a problem of the observable data of the holy book of the Bible. Let’s scrap that book as a source of information about human rights.

Indeed, this whole post is equivalent to my writings on the ontology of morality since human rights are merely moral proclamations that any assume are objective that somehow transcend time and culture.

Over time and thought and society, people tend towards agreement on moral matters. Unless you’re America right now. In fact, the States is a great example of how, in reality, human rights are conceptual, how they aren’t written into the ether. The country is divided on abortion, and the right of a woman to their own body and the right to life of a foetus. I have discussed this, with connected ideas, in terms of personhood 9as a word ascribed to a set of properties, and how this is subjective) in “What Is Personhood? Setting the Scene.“

Human rights sound lovely, but until we do something with them, they are meaningless, or they have no ramifications.

Human rights, therefore, are the philosophical underpinnings of moral thought that form the foundations to law. As we grow into a global society, the term “human right” takes on a more transcendent quality that dismisses borders in favour of the human race: it becomes a universal term. This is why it is often connected to the UN, an organisation that sets to unite the world and see humanity as one. This international law, it is hoped, somehow trumps the national and parochial laws of individual countries.

Until we codify human rights into law – first into local and national laws, but more usefully into more universal, border transcendent laws – the thinking, the philosophy, behind those human rights is ineffectual and pragmatically impotent.

In short, “human rights” is a term that signifies “moral philosophy”, but the “right” part of it only means something when there is a legal framework to make the moral proclamation binding. We all know what a legal right is:

1a: a claim recognized and delimited by law for the purpose of securing it

b: the interest in a claim which is recognized by and protected by sanctions of law imposed by a state, which enables one to possess property or to engage in some transaction or course of conduct or to compel some other person to so engage or to refrain from some course of conduct under certain circumstances, and for the infringement of which claim the state provides a remedy in its courts of justice

2: the aggregate of the capacities, powers, liberties, and privileges by which a claim is secured

3: a capacity of asserting a legally recognized claim — compare LEGAL DUTY

4: a right cognizable in a common-law court as distinguished from a court having jurisdiction in equity

The law works to enable an entity within its jurisdiction the capacity to do, have or be something. Without that, you just have one person or people making moral claims to another person or people. Law makes these things binding.

To mention God, theists often claim morality is only binding when objectively embedded within the entity of God.

This is patent nonsense and is at very best a promissory note. Secular, legal rights that are binding in light of legal organisations such as law enforcement and jurisprudence, as well as prison services and suchlike, are far more tangible than what is claimed within the theistic notion of binding morality. There are real-world ramifications to not adhering to such rights as laid out in any given legal code.

In conclusion, then, set out your human rights as a philosophical endeavour and then write these into law, preferably international law that transcends borders so that they become, as much as possible, universal. The reality will be that we arrive at these agreements by consensus. Hopefully, the consensus utilises the tools of logic and reason, observation and data analysis.

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My Atheistic Moral Philosophy; Objective, Subjective and Theistic Morality

Last updated on: September 25, 2018 at 9:36 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

As promised, here, finally, is a hopefully succinct synopsis (ha, er, impossible) of my moral philosophy. In setting it out, I will also counter positions adopted and claimed by theistic thinkers and apologists (am I implying apologists aren’t thinkers?).

What do different cultures actually think is right? (descriptive)

How should people act, morally speaking? (normative)

What do right and ought actually mean? (meta-ethics)

Abstract Ideas

Morality is an abstract idea, so surely we would need to know what an abstract idea is and what its ontology (principles of existence) is? As many of you know, I am a conceptual nominalist.

Nominalism arose in reaction to the problem of universals, specifically accounting for the fact that some things are of the same type. For example, Fluffy and Kitzler are both cats, or, the fact that certain properties are repeatable, such as: the grass, the shirt, and Kermit the Frog are green. One wants to know in virtue of what are Fluffy and Kitzler both cats, and what makes the grass, the shirt, and Kermit green.

The realist answer is that all the green things are green in virtue of the existence of a universal; a single abstract thing that, in this case, is a part of all the green things. With respect to the color of the grass, the shirt and Kermit, one of their parts is identical. In this respect, the three parts are literally one. Greenness is repeatable because there is one thing that manifests itself wherever there are green things.

Nominalism denies the existence of universals. The motivation for this flows from several concerns, the first one being where they might exist… Particular physical objects merely exemplify or instantiate the universal. But this raises the question: Where is this universal realm? One possibility is that it is outside of space and time…. However, naturalists assert that nothing is outside of space and time. Some Neoplatonists, such as the pagan philosopher Plotinus and the philosopher Augustine, imply (anticipating conceptualism) that universals are contained within the mind of God. To complicate things, what is the nature of the instantiation or exemplification relation?

Conceptualists hold a position intermediate between nominalism and realism, saying that universals exist only within the mind and have no external or substantial reality.

Moderate realists hold that there is no realm in which universals exist, but rather universals are located in space and time wherever they are manifest. Now, recall that a universal, like greenness, is supposed to be a single thing. Nominalists consider it unusual that there could be a single thing that exists in multiple places simultaneously. The realist maintains that all the instances of greenness are held together by the exemplification relation, but this relation cannot be explained.

Finally, many philosophers prefer simpler ontologies populated with only the bare minimum of types of entities, or as W. V. Quine said “They have a taste for ‘desert landscapes.’” They attempt to express everything that they want to explain without using universals such as “catness” or “chairness.”

End result? Realism is, in my opinion, untenable and (conceptual) nominalism is not only a more coherent argument, it is also borne out by actual data and the world around us. The fact that no moral philosophy works perfectly,, the fact that we all believe slightly different things of morality, shows that there is, descriptively, subjectivity concerning moral philosophy.

Objective Morality

We apply the abstract labels of moral evaluation to actions and intentions of humans. Actions are themselves events with real, physical properties. Intentions are different to actions in that they are states of minds. Of course, with the position that the mental supervenes on the physical (as I claim), then there is a sense that such mental states of intentions are themselves reducible to physical properties.

When we talk about “morality” as a whole, we talk about the moral laws and prescriptions, and the truth values of a moral proposition. For me, there is no ether or locus for morality outside of our brains where such ideas can exist in an ontic sense. In this way, morality is a conceptual enterprise that is constructed by our brains to create a moral map of the world that we can use to navigate the social landscape.

We can use science to help us, as Sam Harris does, arrive at the best course of action, given a particular goal. But, I think, setting out that goal is a philosophical project and that requires some abstract thought, perhaps setting out axioms in one’s framework. You can argue that there is an objectively better course of action given two options, A and B. If you are looking for wellbeing or happiness (for example), as your endgame for morality, then perhaps option B empirically gets you more of those things. However, setting that as your endgame is not an objective ideal. It is a subjective, conceptual ideal. I would add that for morality to make any coherent sense, for me at any rate, it needs to be goal-oriented, and setting those goals is a subjective project.

I struggle to be able to make sense of “objective” abstracta as mind-independent “things”, since all conceptual entities must, to my mind, be mind-dependent; they are things of the mind.

Simply put, if there were no minds to conceive of morality, there would be no morality.

What do the Experts Believe?

Love it or hate it, if we are going to discuss ideas of morality and moral philosophy, then we must defer to the experts to some degree. Not, of course, in a fallacious manner of appealing to authority or, indeed, an argumentum ad populum. It is sheer folly to ignore the views of the people who spend their lives investigating moral ideas. I would not build a nuclear power station without having a few chats to well-qualified particle and nuclear physicists, while at the same time bending the ears of some proven structural engineers.

So what do philosophers think? Luckily, in 2009, the biggest ever survey of professional and graduate philosophers took place—the philpapers survey. In this survey we learned some important things. 27.7% of philosophers are moral anti-realists. What this means is that only roughly a quarter of philosophers deny the objective truth value of moral statements. Further to this, some 25.9% of philosophers accept or lean toward moral deontology, 23.6% moral consequentialism, and 18.2% virtue ethics. Now we are getting into the pertinent detail. These are the three main contenders for moral theory, split roughly equally, with a healthy “other” (isn’t there always!).

What we can learn from this is that there is a variety of different moral theories that one can adopt, including the denial of moral theories. But the important result is as follows: 72.8% of philosophers are atheists; 14.6% being theists. A huge majority of philosophers deny the existence of a god of any kind. And yet we have just learned that some 67.7% believe in deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics. So, clearly, many philosophers believe that you do not need to believe in a god to coherently hold a moral philosophical worldview.

What Is an Ought?

So, what is an ought? Well, oughts should be seen in their larger context. All too often, we use language sloppily in a way that we take linguistic shortcuts. For example, if I say “I ought to change the oil in my car engine” then most people understand what I mean by implication and inference. This this is actually an apodosis, the part of a conditional sentence that usually starts with then. The problem is, we are missing the protasis, which is the first part of the conditional sentence that usually starts with an if. This is because we are clever enough to make the correct inference and work out what the speaker is meaning.

However, if we were being specific and accurate, we would include the protasis. In this case, the protasis would be “If I want my car engine to work well, then I ought to change the oil in my car engine.” Without the protasis, the sentence “I ought to change the oil in my car engine” is essentially meaningless. This is because you can place anything as the protasis and completely change the overall meaning of the sentence or, indeed, render the apodosis incorrect. In this case, if I said “If, as a scientist, I am testing how well engines work without oil in them” then adding the apodosis, “then I ought to change the oil in the car engine” will not make sense, and the whole sentence is problematic.

Thus the point to make here is that, although we often do it and can make sense of it, if we are to be precise, then we should always include the protasis in a conditional statement.

What religionists do is claim that atheists are not able to ground the moral oughts in a sentence. But oughts are goal-oriented and the goal is contained in a viable protasis. Let’s now turn the tables and see how this works with the theist. The theist states, “You ought to do X” where I will translate this into a generic statement that reads “You ought to be good.” The theist then claims that they have more philosophical right to say this than the atheist. But if I was to ask, simply, “Why?” to the theist, then we start to see how problems can arise. The theist is in danger, without a viable protasis, of merely asserting oughts in a vacuum, that you must be good…in order to be good. This is rather circular and tells us nothing. You ought to change the oil in the engine in order to change the oil in the engine. So, as it stands, the theist has no coherent grounding for their own moral obligations.

On further inspection, the other choices are twofold:

a) in order to get into heaven and avoid hell

b) because God told you so.

The first one looks rather consequentialist in nature and is very self-serving, though I suspect this is the reasoning that underpins a lot of religious thinking. On the other hand, because God told you so faces all the many problems that Divine Command Theories face (I list 16 of them here). Essentially, the only reason to do what God says is to be good, without any recourse to moral reasoning so that morality is at best arbitrary and a-rational and is simply the behaviour, essence or nature of God (as claimed).

All Moral Value Systems Are the Same

Richard Carrier wrote an essay that concluded that all moral value systems are the same, anyway. In “Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same“, he shows how deontology reduces down to consequentialism:

Kant argued that the only reason to obey his categorical imperatives is that doing so will bring us a greater sense of self-worth, that in fact we should “hold ourselves bound by certain laws in order to find solely in our own person a worth” that compensates us for every loss incurred by obeying, for “there is no one, not even the most hardened scoundrel who does not wish that he too might be a man of like spirit,” yet only through the moral life can he gain that “greater inner worth of his own person.” Thus Kant claimed a strong sense of self-worth is not possible for the immoral person, but a matter of course for the moral one, and yet everyone wants such a thing (more even than anything else), therefore everyone has sufficient reason to be moral. He never noticed that he had thereby reduced his entire system of categorical imperatives to a single hypothetical imperative.

He then claims that consequentialism reduces to deontology:

Besides these, there are many other respects in which a full-fledged consequentialism actually ends up entailing every preferable conclusion of any deontological ethical system. Duties are morally compelling because of the wide social consequences of not obeying them. Consequentialism thus collapses to deontology, in respect to anything deontology ever had to offer. Philosophers ought therefore to be analyzing every deontological conclusion they think is sound so as to expose what consequences actually make it morally preferable to what any incompleteconsequentialism seems to entail. Notably, some philosophers have been doing this without even knowing it: it’s called rule utilitarianism. But overall, instead of just saying some deontology entails you do x, do the hard work of asking yourself why you really think doing x is consequentially better. Because really, you do. And it is doing philosophy no service to ignore the consequences you are preferring and why.

Before finally claiming they both reduce to virtue ethics, anyway.

Welcome to the quagmire of moral philosophy.

God, Divine Command Theory and Objective Morality

As Kant would say, we cannot know things in themselves. We use our subjective minds to access everything. If God did embody moral law in some meaningful way, then we have a whole series of issues. God embodies, in his nature and commands, moral prescriptive law, and we must then do what he says in order to be moral ourselves.

Indeed, we get onto critiquing divine moral philosophy. The most common version of this is divine command theory (DCT). I shall list 16 arguments against such in order to put it to bed. The Christian/DCTer would need to successfully refute all 16 points to allow their position to be coherent:

Arbitrariness – There is no third party benchmark and so the idea of goodness becomes arbitrary if it is a non-rational assumption made of God. You cannot defer to something else to morally rationalise God’s nature, as this would then become the moral grounding, and this would not necessitate God. But for God to be that grounding, what makes his commands good become merely arbitrary assertions when lacking such rationalisations. Good becomes merely a synonym of God and lacks any useful meaning.
Direction of causality – The direction of causality works like this: God has lovingness, mercy, kindness etc., but these are not good characteristics, because goodness is rooted in God. These are good BECAUSE God has them. They do not make God good. So if we have lovingness, if we ask why it is good, it is because it reflects God, not for any other reason. Justice and lovingness are only good on account of God having them, not because they obtain any good consequences within or for society, of for any other moral reasoning.
We are good only because we reflect God – Think about the previous point on a practical, everyday basis. When you are being good, you cannot use moral reasoning to define that goodness, only that it reflects God. In other words, moral reasoning cannot ground morality, because then the grounding would not be in God. This leaves us with a weird scenario such that you cannot provide any reasoning for moral actions. “Why is this behaviour good?” cannot be answered in any way other than “because it reflects God’s nature”, and thus moral reasoning becomes impotent. It also means that God cannot have reasons for doing as he does, otherwise these will ground the moral value of the action!
Defies everyday moral reasoning and intuition (in, say, consequences) – In other words, what makes rape wrong, for us, is roughly what harm it causes. For the DCTer, it is because God commanded us not to rape. Although, he kind of did in the Old Testament! We will look about the world and say, “Look how horrible rape is! Look at the harm it does.” But this in no way makes it wrong! This carries no moral value. Of course, this seems patently ridiculous. None of this plays well with our sense of moral intuition. We feel we are being good for X and Y reason, and yet this is supposed to be reflective of God, and this is what makes it good. Yet most everybody being good on a daily basis believes this or thinks of God in this way when being good.
Which God? Which Commands? – We are also unclear as to which god exists, and what each god’s commands are. The commands in the Old Testament appear to have been replaced overnight with the commands of the New Testament. Incidentally, this looks like moral relativism (Inter-Testamental Moral Relativism) such that the historical and geographic context of the Jews defined the morality of their actions. So there is a gross lack of clarity in what actions DO reflect God’s nature – we might call this the Argument From Divine Miscommunication. Is stoning adulterers good? Is it bad? Is it only good before 33CE? Did God’s nature change then? Is all the Bible literally true? If so, then Jesus is literally a door. If not, then Jesus and the Bible talks at times in metaphor. What is metaphor and what is literal? We do not have commands for a good many things in the Bible, what of these? Such divine commands are indeed muddled and unclear at best. Slavery etc. appears to be morally bad, and yet God countenanced it in the Bible.
Genocide and ordinary morality – The idea that God commanded genocide in the Old Testament is also problematic and does not fit well with ordinary morality. But given DCT, it must be morally good. This potentially gets you to an uncomfortable reality: DCT just depends on who tells you stuff. Genocide from God = good. Genocide from Hitler = bad! It all starts looking like the context (moral relativism, even) and the consequences are all important. More on this later. Hitler gets a lot of bad press for his terrible genocide. God less so. The scales are skewed, methinks.
Is God a better stopping point? – Theists have done nothing to show that God is a more appropriate stopping point than the moral properties of kindness, generosity and justice themselves. Why is it, in any rational sense, that grounding morality in God is actually any better than grounding it in real and observable features of the world, such as the consequences that such moral actions obtain? There seems to be this assumption that a framework set outside of our minds and our reality, dictated to by some reasoning or being that we cannot access or remotely understand, is somehow better.
Why follow the commands? – Why should we follow such commands? Only to get into heaven and avoid hell? If so, that is not really a reason to be good. If it is because they are good things to do based on moral reasoning, then again, the framework fails. In this way, there is no reason to accept DCT, even if it is true! See the piece “Heaven & Hell Stop You From Genuinely Morally Evaluating“.
Things not commanded are on limits? – Anything not commanded by God is potentially on limits. Since we cannot access the source directly (God), then we end up having to guess what is good or bad. This is a guess because it cannot be based on moral reasoning! So anything not covered by divine commands in the Bible is on limits as being potentially morally fine. Those actions lacking moral clarity leave us with either having to do moral reasoning, or simply not having a moral clue about what actions we should do in order to be reflective of God. This is even harder when it appears some things are both good and bad, depending on the context!
But God would never command rape! Apart from he did. – The defence that God would never command bad things like murder and rape (i.e., that it is not in his nature) is falsified by the very fact that he DID command it in the Bible! Including the death of all men, women, children and animals in different contexts. Some examples: Murder, rape, and pillage at Jabesh-gilead (Judges 21:10-24); Murder, rape and pillage of the Midianites (Numbers 31:7-18); More Murder Rape and Pillage (Deuteronomy 20:10-14); Laws of Rape (Deuteronomy 22:28-29); Death to the Rape Victim (Deuteronomy 22:23-24); David’s Punishment – Polygamy, Rape, Baby Killing, and God’s “Forgiveness” (2 Samuel 12:11-14); Rape of Female Captives (Deuteronomy 21:10-14); Rape and the Spoils of War (Judges 5:30); Sex Slaves (Exodus 21:7-11); God Assists Rape and Plunder (Zechariah 14:1-2). Nice.
But God would never command rape! Er, how can you know? – Again, the defence is common: “But God would never command rape!” Yet, in order to say that God would never command rape, you have to know that rape is already wrong, independent of God! You cannot say he would never command it because he has never not commanded it, and to say that he wouldn’t would involve moral reasoning! We have this problem with causality, and the Christian can’t say “We know he wouldn’t command rape because we know it is bad because of X and Y reasons”. You get seriously hamstrung when you cannot appeal to moral reasoning!
God cannot know he is all-good… – God cannot even know that he himself is all-good because to do so, he would need to judge himself on an objective standard! This is quite a difficult concept to think about, but how would God be able to have the self-reflective knowledge to be able to claim that he was all-good. All God could say was that he was Godlike. Good, being tautologous with God, means that God would work himself into a circle in trying to define himself. It’s quite similar to God being unable to know that he is not a God-in-a-vat, and that there isn’t a chain of gods, Matrix-style, above him.
Moral development of children – In Morality Without God, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong states ((p. 110):
…anyone who helps and refrains from harming others just because God commanded her to do so might not be hard-hearted, but her motivations are far from ideal. It would be better for them to help and refrain from harming other people out of concern for those other people.
That is what we ought to teach our children. Studies of development and education show that children develop better moral attitudes as adults if they are raised to empathize rather than to obey commands without any reasons rather than to avoid punishment. To raise children to obey God’s commands just because God commanded them will undermine true caring and true morality.
Non-Christians who have no access to Christianity – People who have not read the Bible or experienced the Christian God would have no idea how to be moral (unless, again, there is an acceptable recourse to moral reasoning, which, again, has no need of God). Think of horrible people existing before biblical times, or in different countries without access to those divine commands. Is murder acceptable because they have not had divine commands?
Apologists like William Lane Craig have even posited ideas such as that these people God knew would not freely come to love him, or wouldn’t simply be bad people, so he front-loaded their souls into these pre-biblical times as cannon fodder.
Stephen Maitzen: Ordinary Morality Presupposes Atheism – Here is an argument from Stephen Maitzen. And this is an analogy used by Christians themselves. Imagine that you are a five-year-old being taken to the doctors for an injection against a deadly disease. You do not understand how immunisation works. Your parents cannot adequately explain it to you. You just have to know that a greater good will come about from your immunisation. It is a piece of necessary pain and suffering, the needle going in, that will bring about a greater good. Now, an onlooker would never see the doctor just about to inject this poor boy, run over and rugby tackle the doctor so as to stop the pain. That would stop the greater good from taking place. However, that IS what every god-fearing Christian SHOULD do. Let me explain. imagine an old lady being set upon by some youths across the road. Using our ordinary morality, if we saw this, we would like to think we would step in and stop this from happening. But there can be no such thing as gratuitous evil in this world with an all-loving God. This man getting beaten up, as horrible as it is, is necessary for a greater good to come about. By stepping in and helping this woman, we are stopping the greater good from coming about. We would be rugby tackling the doctor to stop those youths! In other words, as Maitzen states, ordinary morality simply does not make sense under theism. Ordinary morality presupposes atheism. Moreover, this whole scenario of the problem of evil and greater goods coming from suffering is consequentialist in nature. God is USING people as a means to an end. This is the sort of utilitarianism that theists decry, and attack atheists for holding to.
God is a consequentialist – And finally… A fundamental problem for Christians is that theologians claim that things like DCT are correct, but actually, most of the population tend to be consequentialists. As William Lane Craig has declared: “consequentialism is a terrible ethic”. However, it turns out that about 90% of people are intuitively consequentialist. The most famous experiment to look into this is the trolley problem. 90% of people would pull the lever. This goes dramatically down if they have to push a fat man off the bridge, which shows that morality is a function of psychology. It turns out that (as Jonathan Haidt would say in “The emotional dog and the rational tail”) that we intuitively moralise and then scrabble around for reasons as to why we did something.But Christians supposedly decry such consequentialism. Funny this, because it turns out that God is the biggest consequentialist of them all. You will hear that God moves in mysterious ways, that there is a reason for everything. The Problem of Evil dictates that there can be no gratuitous evil, that every bit of suffering must be necessary towards eventuating a greater good. So the moral value of the action which brings about suffering is in the consequence of the eventual greater good. It cannot be good that all of the world, bar 8, and all of the animals bar some died in a great flood. No. So the goodness comes from the greater good which this brought about. Everything happens for a reason and God moves in mysterious ways. Jesus being sacrificed was for the sins of the world. This was pure consequentialism. In fact, every atrocity in both the Bible and the real world is explained in this way.But, according to Christians, this ethic is terrible. The ethical system employed by theologians to use in EVERY SINGLE THEODICY is consequentialist, and apparently terrible! See more in my essay here.

That should really close the case on God being the objective basis of morality. See here for problems with another Christian value system, Natural Law.

So what DO I believe?

At an ontological level, I am a moral skeptic. Morality has no ontic existence. Since abstracts do not exist outside of our minds, morality, being abstract, does not exist outside of our minds.

But it does exist in our minds, conceptually, and we pragmatically use our interpretations of morality in order to operate successfully as a social species.

My view, but I am open to change, is that morality is largely psychological. As ephemerol stated here:

…the foundation and core of our intuitive, emotional empathic responses, and I would guess, also of all our basis for cognitive moral reasoning, is the seemingly simplistic understanding that there are things we wouldn’t want others to do to us, and, just maybe, it seems like a reasonable guess that others also wouldn’t like it if we were to do those things to them either.

The funny thing is, although religious people often float the silly idea that a god is somehow involved in morality, the law of reciprocity is an entirely secular and humanistic statement, and depends solely upon the existence, not of gods, nor of religious texts, but just two or more human beings. Nor does it depend upon some unfathomable feat of wisdom such that it could only have come down from on high; it just requires someone to be neurotypical enough to possess the capacity for empathy. In fact, there’s even a fly in this ointment, such as it comes down to us, that indicates that “the golden rule” isn’t quite as wise or as golden as it might at first appear, ruling out some sort of perfectly wise divine source.

Of course, the golden rule predated Jesus by a long way and has turned up in pretty much every society and every religion. It appears to be a fundamental psychological and functional mechanism – indeed, we see it in other animals, too. The platinum rule is an upgrade:

Think about it: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The Golden Rule implies the basic assumption that other people would like to be treated the way that you would like to be treated. The alternative to the Golden Rule is the Platinum Rule: “Treat others the way they want to be treated.”

We use our psychological metrics and systems of morality as a good guide – good, because they allow us to operate with social success. This. we interpret as “goodness” (amongst possibly other characteristics).

The reason why consequentialism, as a system, is so intuitively powerful, is that a) it seems to be psychologically ingrained (89% of people would pull the lever in the trolley experiment, and the percentage is reversed if we have to actually push someone to do it) , and b) it is non-derivative.

To ground any claim, from morality to anything else, we have to face the Munchausen Trilemma:

The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point)
The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever)
The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)

Given the weaknesses of the first two, we are left with the last. Axioms, as self-evident truths, ground the “why” answer with a sort of “just because”. In morality, happiness (pleasure, lack of pain) is a really useful moral currency because it is self-evidently good: Why did you do that? To give optimal happiness? Why? Because happiness is good. Why? It just self-evidently is. It makes me happy. And this is as good an axiom as I think you will find.

Compare that with God as moral command-giver and not being allowed to use moral reasoning, and all you get is do good either because heaven/hell, or do good because God is good, and that is good because God. It’s all rather circular.

Now, consequentialism is not perfect. No moral value system is. After all these thousands of years, we all still disagree, so we can be assured that there simply is no right answer, and this is because it is a conceptual, subjective construction without an objectively “right” manner of being.

Consequentialism is also strong because it seeks to perpetually make the world a better place. It is not about the in-group, about the individual, necessarily – it seeks to make the world a better place. As a general principle, this is pretty noble. It can also be a weakness because it is never-ending and we end up sweeping the streets of micro-organisms in front of us so as to minimise moral impact – we become like the Jains.

It is worth saying that consequentialism has many, many different flavours and add-ons. See the SEP entry on it for more detail. As a rule of thumb, though, I think it is intuitively attractive and pragmatically useful. Indeed, we use it politically all of the time. NICE, the organisation in the NHS, uses outcome based formulae to evaluate drugs and treatments against each other in order to choose the best use of finite money and resources to choose between which drugs and treatments to afford. You can see consequentialism at play in each and every area of policy, both domestic and international.

I am not a fan of deontology – this idea of realism – I do think it is a harder system to arrive at for a naturalist (well, for anyone). Things like the Inquiring Murderer offer problems for establishing any such system that doesn’t seem to actually derive back to a form of consequentialism:

The situation in a nutshell is this: you are cornered outside of your house by a bloodthirsty madman who is looking for your friend. You know that this friend is inside of your house. The madman tells you in no uncertain terms that he will kill this person as soon as he finds him, and demands to know his whereabouts. For some reason or other, you do not have the ability to remain silent but must answer this villain with truth or falsehood. Is a lie in this case morally permissible? (On A Supposed Right to Lie 611).

Kant’s answer, of course, is that not even this horrific circumstance would validate a deliberate falsehood; lying is a priori wrong because it is not an action that can be universally enacted according to the moral law, representing a contradiction in nature. (Source)

I strongly believe that morality is underwritten by or at least heavily entwined with empathy, although the term “empathy” can be a catch-all one that needs closer defining. So, for me, morality is not some simple-to-box-up neat and succinct theory. It is problematic and messy, and it depends whether you are talking about ontology, normative values, logical constructions, truth and axioms.

Conclusion

Objective, divinely-based moral value systems don’t work at all.

Indeed, no moral value system works perfectly – they are all flawed in some way(s).

I think we can make the world a better place by implementing the platinum rule as long as that doesn’t have dire consequential outcomes. It is useful to use consequentialist rules of thumb. We reasonably want to try to make the world a better place for generations to come because it is inherent within us, for genetic reasons, and due to empathy, and psychology that can work itself into predicted futures. It feels good to do so; it feels right; it benefits us and benefits the world universally (if done well).

Now, there is ample opportunity for shed loads of argument here. Do we calculate goodness over a 5, 10, 50, 100-year basis? Is biodiversity morally better than human flourishing? How do we calculate an equilibrium? What is a better world? Can we justify our goals and axioms (when, by definition, axioms cannot be justified as they are supposedly self-evident)?

The whole crux to morality is setting out the goal, the protasis. Once we agree on that, all else follows fairly well. The world is a complex place full of gazillions of variables and this means predicting the future is bloody tough, which means being moral is bloody tough (as in, to calculate). Hence the rules of thumb. We need to teach empathy well and to understand the world better and the consequences that come about from different actions. This will underwrite good, evidence-based (moral) policy-making.

Other Labels

Cognitivism vs Noncognitivism

Cognitivism is the meta-ethical view that ethical sentences express propositions and can therefore be true or false (they are truth-apt), which noncognitivists deny.^[1] Cognitivism is so broad a thesis that it encompasses (among other views) moral realism (which claims that ethical sentences express propositions about mind-independent facts of the world), moral subjectivism (which claims that ethical sentences express propositions about peoples’ attitudes or opinions), and error theory (which claims that ethical sentences express propositions, but that they are all false, whatever their nature). [source]

I think things can be true or false but that we can never know them to be either (cogito ergo sum). All we know are probabilities, all the way down to axioms. So it depends on how you define these things – it depends on the axioms and the goals that come out of them, and definitions of truth. I am happy to be called either, as long as the definition accords with my previous sentences. Something can be true, but we could never know the truth value, and it depends on our goals, which themselves may not have truth values (if I want X – is there truth to X being something we would universally want?).

Subjectivism, Etc.

I am not a subjectivist but more of an ideal observer theory adherent: the view that what is right is determined by the attitudes that a hypothetical ideal observer (a being who is perfectly rational, imaginative and informed) would have. There is no truth to a subjective claim, where truth is a correspondence type notion of a claim mapping onto objective reality, which is itself tough because there are objective properties, but accessing them is necessarily subjective. In other words, the true colour of something can only be subjective unless describing the simple properties (knowing that language and understanding is itself subjective) of the wavelengths of light.

I am quite partial to modern interpretations of ethical hedonism, which you can read about here. In fact, I would probably advocate living in a Matrix-style utopian experience machine and allow the rest of the biodiverse world to live in balance without too much human intervention. But that’s a whole other discussion.

Phew, that wasn’t succinct.

I’ll return to some more labelling in a future post.

Summary of My Moral Positions (and Atheism)

Last updated on: September 16, 2018 at 7:06 pm By Jonathan MS Pearce

I will soon be writing more about the ontology and exact positions of my moral philosophy. In the meantime, here is a synopsis and set of links for some of my moral writing:

And so on.