Category: morality

Moral, religious and free-will fictionalism: how dangerous are they?

November 3, 2015 • 12:00 pm

At its philosophy website The Stone, the New York Times finally published an article that sparked my interest, though of course I don’t completely agree with it. It’s called “How to live a lie,” and it’s by William Irwin, a philosopher at King’s College in Pennsylvania.

By “living a lie,” Irwin refers to three forms of “fictionalism”: instances of people pretending to believe, or acting as if they believe, things that aren’t true. The three forms he considers are religion, free will, and morality.

Under religion, Irwin argues that many “believers” don’t really believe, but simply act as if they do because it improves their lives. He quotes philosopher Jean Kazez, whom I used to discuss on this site, as saying she’s a Jewish fictionalist:

Indeed, [philosopher Richard] Joyce speculates that some people probably take a fictionalist approach to God; they accept the existence of God but they do not really believe God exists.

. . .  As an example, the philosopher Jean Kazez has written, “I am a religious fictionalist. I don’t just banish all religious sentences to the flames. I make believe some of them are true, and I think that’s all to the good.” At her family’s Seder, she wrote, “I pretended there was a deity to be praised for various things.” Kazez embraces this particular form of fictionalism for personal reasons: “I like pretending the Passover story is true because of the continuity it creates —it ties me to the other people at the table, past years that I’ve celebrated Passover (in many different ways, with different people). I like feeling tied to Jews over the centuries and across the world. I also like the themes of liberation and freedom that can be tied to the basic story.”

Well, no harm done there, although Dave Silverman—who claims that “secular Jews” damage atheism because they enable real Jews to claim nonbelieving Jews (I consider myself one) for faith—will disagree. (But I disagree with him: no rabbi has ever claimed me!). But I think that the claim that most, or even many, religious people really only pretend to believe is exaggerated.  For one thing, they don’t act as if they’re pretending: they take actions, like building creation museums, trying to get creationism in schools, opposing gay rights and abortion, killing apostates and non-Muslims, and so on, that suggest that their beliefs are more than self-realized fictions.

The notion that most religious belief is actually form of fictive imagining was proposed by Neil van Leeuwen in a recent paper, and philosopher Maarten Boudry and I wrote a paper taking issue with his claims. You can see the whole discussion here, but I’ll add that our peer-reviewed paper, soon to appear in Philosophical Psychology, gives me CREDIBILITY as a philosopher. Take heed, Dr. Pigliucci!

As for free will, by and large Irwin agrees with me: he’s a determinist, and doesn’t really buy compatibilism, either:

Adopting compatibilism, I would still feel as if I have free will in the traditional sense and that I could have chosen steak and that the future is wide open concerning what I will have for dessert. There seems to be a “user illusion” that produces the feeling of free will.

Yes, and that “user illusion” may in fact be an evolved tendency. I, too, am a hardnosed free-will rejecter, but of course I still feel and act like I make choices. I know that’s an illusion, but it’s one that’s necessary for me to function. But when we realize on an intellectual level that our “choices” are really determined by our genes and environment, many of them well in advance, there is a consequence of realizing it’s a fiction—a consequence different from Kazez’s pretend-God. And that is that realizing the hegemony of determinism has real consequences for how we judge people, how we empathize with them, and how we structure our judicial system. (I know that some readers disagree here.) So there’s a value in realizing that we’re deceiving ourselves about free will.

Where I disagree with Irwin is when he comes to his main point: the “illusion” that there is are objective moral judgments. He realizes, as do I, that there isn’t any objectivity. As I see it, morality is in part an evolutionary phenomenon: a way of acting and thinking that was selected to preserve harmony in our small ancstral bands. (Those bands probably prevailed for nearly the entirety of our evolution since we split from the ancestors of the other great apes about 5 million years ago. We’ve been “civilized” for only about 20,000 years: 0.4% of that time!). On top of our evolved moral feelings and behaviors lies a veneer of “morality” arrived at by rational thought and consensus (and often said to derive from religion, but we know from the Euthyphro argument that that’s not the case).

Contra Sam Harris, I don’t think that there are any objective moral rules or values. To me, morality represents a preference for ways to behave. And I don’t mean to demean morality by saying that: I think it’s a preference we’ve arrived at because we know that what we call “morality” helps us construct and preserve harmonious societies. I am a consequentialist, so although I don’t see morality as “objective”, I can say that I prefer actions and behaviors that lead to the best consequence (whatever that means) for society. That is my choice, and others feel differently. I’d prefer, in fact, to jettison the terms “morality” and “moral responsibility” entirely, since they’re freighted with religious overtones, but I know that’s not gonna happen.

And I think that, when pressed, people who say that something is objectively right or wrong would also become consequentialists. Asked to justify WHY something is right or wrong, many would speak of the effects of that judgment on society. Thus, it doesn’t really bother me much if people speak of morality as if it’s objective. But it does bother Irwin:

Following a fictionalist account of morality, would mean that we would accept moral statements like “stealing is wrong” while not believing they are true. As a result, we would act as if it were true that “stealing is wrong,” but when pushed to give our answer to the theoretical, philosophical question of whether “stealing is wrong,” we would say no. The appeal of moral fictionalism is clear. It is supposed to help us overcome weakness of will and even take away the anxiety of choice, making decisions easier.

But if you simply conceive of the word “wrong” as I do, meaning “having deleterious consequences for society,” then one can really believe provisionally such statements are true. (That’s a matter for empirical study, of course.) This doesn’t mean that I have an objective morality, but simply that I believe that acting in a certain way has certain consequences, and I don’t like those consequences.  And I don’t see a real problem with this—not nearly as much as I do with free-will fictionalism, which has led to harsh judicial systems, the damning of gays and others for making the “wrong choice,” and propping up religion’s claim that we are free to choose a Saviour, and are damned if we choose wrong. Irwin:

There is, though, a practical objection to moral fictionalism. Once we become aware that moral judgments have no objective basis in metaphysical reality, how can they function effectively? We are likely to recall that morality is a fiction whenever we are in a situation in which we would prefer not to follow what morality dictates. If I am a moral fictionalist who really wants to steal your pen, the only thing that will stop me is prudence, not a fictional moral belief.

It is not clear that this practical objection can be overcome, but even if it could, moral fictionalism would still be disingenuous, encouraging us to turn a blind eye to what we really believe. It may not be the most pernicious kind of self-deception, but it is self-deception nonetheless, a fact that will bother anyone who places value on truth. Fictionalism has the understandable goal of facilitating what one wants to do — acting as a kind of commitment strategy — but it would be preferable if one could do what one wanted to do without this maneuver.

Moral fictionalism is disingenuous only if you see morality as being “objective.” I’m not sure that most people think it is, but I may be wrong.

Finally, Irwin’s last paragraph sets free-will fictionalism apart from religious and moral fictionalism, and I don’t agree:

William James famously remarked that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Well, I cannot believe in free will, but I can accept it. In fact, if free will fictionalism is involuntary, I have no choice but to accept free will. That makes accepting free will easy and undeniably sincere. Accepting the reality of God or morality, on the other hand, are tougher tasks, and potentially disingenuous.

First of all, “accepting free will” is not the right way to construe this; what I’d prefer is saying “acting as though we think we have free will.” That’s not the same as “accepting its existence.” But accepting the reality of God and morality don’t seem much harder to many people; such bliefs are simply natural to many folks—especiallly believers.

As for being “disingenuous,” well, all three are disingenuous, for free will and objective morality are illusions (in the sense of not being what they seem to be), and the idea of God is a delusion.  I think Irwin’s piece gives us food for thought, but I don’t think he’s thought very deeply about the notion of “objective morality.”

h/t: Greg Mayer

A sad end to a woodpecker

October 30, 2015 • 6:50 am

by Matthew Cobb

This macabre photo illustrates how birds are able to sleep while they roost – their claws are adapted to grasp when the muscles are relaxed. So even though this bird has died (causes unknown), it is still clinging to the tree. This is also why all those drawings you see of pterodactyls roosting in trees are rong – they didn’t have this adaptation, so couldn’t perch.

 

The disutility of utilitarianism

September 15, 2015 • 11:00 am

From Zach Weinersmith’s strip SMBC, via Matthew Cobb:

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Matthew is of course a Brit, and his email of this link to me was headed “Ouch!” But of course one problem with this argument is that by voicing your own views on morality, you might improve society. That, after all, is the reason why civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights have become the norm. They were not promulgated by “silent judgement.” But maybe I’m making too much out of a humorous and clever strip.

Michael Shermer’s “review” of Faith versus Fact

July 18, 2015 • 10:45 am

I put “review” in quotes above, because Michael Shermer’s precis of Faith versus Fact in the latest Scientific American isn’t really a review at all, but a further plumping for his claim that—as Sam Harris also espouses—science can hand us objective moral truths. (See Shermer’s new book, The Moral Arc, for a fuller exposition.) The full Sci Am piece is behind a paywall, but here’s what Michael says about FvF.

He’s talking here about Steve Gould’s NOMA hypothesis: that science and religion comprise “nonoverlapping magisteria” because science’s duty is to tell us about the natural world, while the bailiwick of religion is that of meaning, morals, and values. Gould saw this as a way to reconcile the two areas, with each occupying an “equally important” area.  I take Gould’s thesis apart of FvF, but you can read my book if you want to see those criticisms. Here’s what Shermer says:

Initially I embraced NOMA because a peaceful concordat is usually more desirable than a bitter conflict (plus, Gould was a friend), but as I engaged in debates with theists over the years, I saw that they were continually trespassing onto our turf with truth claims on everything from the ages of rocks and miraculous healings to the reality of the afterlife and the revivification of a certain Jewish carpenter. Most believers hold the tenets of their religion to be literally (not metaphorically) true, and they reject NOMA in practice if not in theory—for the same reason many scientists do. In his 2015 penetrating analysis of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne eviscerates NOMA as “simply an unsatisfying quarrel about labels that, unless you profess a watery deism, cannot reconcile science and religion.”

Curiously, however, Coyne then argues that NOMA holds for scientists when it comes to meaning and morals and that “by and large, scientists now avoid the ‘naturalistic fallacy’—the error of drawing moral lessons from observations of nature.” But if we are not going to use science to determine meaning and morals, then what should we use? If NOMA fails, then it must fail in both directions, thereby opening the door for us to experiment in finding scientific solutions for both morals and meaning.

Well, how about using reason and philosophy, as well as innate preferences, to determine meaning and morals? I won’t go into my objections to the science-can-tell-us-moral-truths fallacy (yes, it’s a fallacy), as I’ve laid them out before. Suffice it to say that at the bottom of all “scientific” schemes of determining morality are preferences that lie outside science’s ambit. Certainly science can help us determine the best ways to realize our preferences, but can Shermer tell us, for instance, whether it’s immoral to shoot coyotes that are suspected of eating livestock? How do you weigh the different varieties of well being (if that’s your currency for morality), and balance them against each other? How can that ever be more than a judgment call?

Well, I’ll let the readers argue this one out. At least Shermer called my book a “penetrating analysis” in the middle of an extended advertisement for his own book. Reader John O’Neall informs me that both Shermer’s and my own book are on the Edge summer reading list (no surprise given that John Brockman, who runs Edge, is our agent), but there are several other intriguing books on the list, including the second volume of Richard Dawkins’s autobiography and Yuval Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which has gotten good reviews.

Michael Ruse: Proud to be an accommodationist

May 31, 2015 • 10:30 am

It’s been a while since we discussed the philosopher Michael Ruse, but he’s suddenly surfaced in the pages of Zygon, “The Journal of Religion and Science,” with a very strange article called “Why I am an accommodationist and proud of it” (reference and possible free link below).

I found this article because Jason Rosenhouse sent it to me, and emailed me yesterday that he had posted about it at his site EvolutionBlog. At first I decided to not to post about Ruse’s paper, as I’m sure Jason did his usual terrific job, but then I thought it would be fun to read and react to the paper without first reading Jason’s review. So I’ll do that now, and then at the end I’ll go read Jason’s take and give you the link.

Ruse’s article has one aim, something he’s been pursuing ever since he wrote his book Can A Darwinian be a Christian? (the answer was “yes!”).  As you can tell from the title, he wants to show why religion and science are compatible, and he prides himself on doing it through philosophy, though his tactic is simply a recasting of Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) hypothesis. The infusion of philosophy, though, seems pretty weak, as you’ll see. Further, the magisteria that are non-overlapping—or at least three of the four areas identified by Ruse—are at least partly overlapping, for science can make inroads into most of the questions that Ruse deems off limits to science. He is, then, making god-of-the-gaps arguments in at least three cases. Finally, Ruse, for some reason I can’t fathom, has taken it upon himself to tell Christians how they can retain their faith in the face of science, even though he himself doesn’t believe in God.

But let’s look at his thesis.

First, Ruse takes the usual swipes at New Atheists, for he’s clearly offended that they’ve gone after him for his accommodationism. Ruses’s butthurt is a constant theme in his accommodationism. In this case he’s particularly upset that Dawkins “slapped the Neville Chamberlain label” on him in The God Delusion. , though, as I recall, Dawkins didn’t call Ruse that directly, but simply characterized the NOMA hypothesis as a failed “peace in our time” approach.

But we needn’t tarry over Ruse licking his wounds. He proceeds to his philosophical thesis, which is pretty thin. He claims that science has incorporated the idea of “metaphor” into its argot, and that this automatically leads to a NOMA result. The first claim is true; the second doubtful.

Certainly science has used metaphors as a way of explaining things: Ruse especially emphasizes the “organism as machine” metaphor, which isn’t that much of a metaphor (we are, in fact, molecular machines). But there are tropes like talking about the “purpose” of an organ, the “design” of features, and the brain as a “meat machine.” He also mentions phrases like the “big bang,” “cell suicide,” “genetic code,” the “spin” of electrons, and so on.

So far so good. Where Ruse goes off the rails is his subsequent claim that the very use of metaphors, simply because they focus on one thing, automatically sets some areas of inquiry off limits. He says this, for instance:

And, one thing that Kuhn always stressed about paradigms/metaphors is that they work successfully because they make you focus. They throw new light on areas of inquiry and interest and they do this in part by cutting off questions in other areas. A paradigm/metaphor simply is silent about things outside its domain. I say my love is a rose. I am telling you that she is beautiful and fresh and much else. If I am being funny, I might also mean that she is a little bit prickly. I am not telling you whether she is an atheist or an evangelical, whether she is good at mathematics or has trouble with simple arithmetic. It is not that the metaphor is saying she isn’t an atheist or an evangelical. It is not saying that this is not an important question. It is just that it is not asking about this at all.

This is how Ruse drags philosophy into his thesis, for he then claims that by using metaphors, science rules some questions either unanswerable or off limits. How he goes from metaphor to NOMA is unclear to me. The use of a metaphor doesn’t rule other questions out of court. It does ignore them, but so what? A scientific metaphor doesn’t mean that science can’t answer other questions, it just means that the writer is concentrating on only one. But here’s Ruse’s segue from metaphor into god-of-the-gaps:

QUESTIONS NOT ASKED; ANSWERS NOT GIVEN

Apply this all-important fact about metaphor to the root metaphor of the machine. What we expect is that modern science, that is science since the Scientific Revolution, will simply not ask certain questions. It is not that the questions are unimportant. They may be very significant. It is just that science under the machine metaphor will remain silent on these questions. So now the philosophical question becomes: What questions do I suggest that science under the machine metaphor will not ask?

Ruse then gives four questions that science supposedly can’t answer, and, as he shows subsequently, Christianity can, or at least can try to. I quote:

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Heidegger (1959) speaks of this as the fundamental question of philosophy. Whether this be so or not, it is not one answered by the machine metaphor. Of course you can ask questions about what came before the Big Bang and that sort of thing. But that is not quite what the fundamental question is asking. It wants to know the answer to the very fact of existence. The machine metaphor takes this for granted. You take your plastic and your steel and your copper and your aluminum and you build your automobile.

Well, to some extent that question has been answered, at least for a quantum vacuum, which is unstable and can produce “something.” Or, we could say that the question is meaningless because there has always been something, which can at least be partly tested by science investigating whether universes can produce other universes, and so on.

Further, the question can be thrown back in the laps of theists by asking, “Why is there God rather than nothing?” The answer, “Because God is eternal” is no more satisfying than saying “Because the universe is eternal.” At any rate, this question is not completely off limits to science, though later Ruse tells Christians that they can simply insert “God” as an answer. This is a god-of-the-gaps argument.

2. What are the foundations of morality?

This is the Humean (Hume [1739] 1940) problem that you cannot go from an “is” to an “ought.” You cannot go from the way that the world is—which is what science under the machine metaphor tries to describe and understand—to the way that the world ought to be—which is the moral question. An automobile takes me quickly to the restaurant for lunch. Should I drive it or not? I will save my time but cause pollution. What is the right decision? Science cannot tell me.

Few scientists assert that science can tell us what is right or wrong (Sam Harris is one exception), but all scientists realize that empirical investigation can inform many moral questions (i.e., when can fetuses be viable outside the womb?). But the foundations of morality can certainly be studied by science, just as the foundations of religion can be studied by psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and anthropology (See Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Boyer’s Religion Explained for game tries). Ruse is mistaking the origin of morality with normative morality, i.e., what is the best way to act? And he should at least admit that science has something to say about what one should do, for it can help us discern the consequences of one action versus another.

Again, Ruse will later claim that for many religionists God tells them what is right and wrong, even though we’ve known since Plato that this can’t be true. This, too, is a kind of god-of-the-gaps argument, for of course there is a long history of secular ethics (the ancient Greeks, Mill, Hume, Singer, Grayling) which guides us in thinking about morality without any reference to religious beliefs or God’s will.

3. What is the nature of consciousness?

. . . A machine is a material object and that almost by definition is not a thinking entity. This is not to say that machines cannot think. If the cognitive scientists are correct, they can. It is rather that thinking in machine terms alone does not explain thinking. To put the matter another way, the only satisfactory solution to the mind–body problem is Cartesian dualism—res extensa and res cogitans—and that has to be false. I don’t think the problem can be solved, and I am certain it cannot be solved by science.

This is clearly a god-of-the-gaps problem, for at least the mechanism and evolutionary origin of consciousness are surely the purview of science, though there’s a reason it’s called a “hard problem.” But later Ruse will claim that religion can successfully address this problem. Depending on how you define the question, though, religion doesn’t necessarily even have the ability to answer it. If it’s construed as “how does consciousness work?”, religion is impotent. And “thinking” isn’t the same thing as “consciousness”, so this part is not well phrased.

Finally, Ruse gets to the one problem where science truly is impotent, for it’s a question that has no objective answer. But religion doesn’t give one, either.

4. What is the purpose of it all?

The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg (1992) says that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. Why am I not surprised? We have seen that the way that the machine metaphor is used eschews any answer to this question. So on it, science remains silent.

Different religions have different “answers”, and even within a faith people diverge in their answers. But this question can’t even be asked without evidence of a god, for without a god there is no sense in trying to divine a “purpose”. Purposes come from agents, and you must demonstrate a supernatural agent before you can even say this question becomes meaningful. Ruse doesn’t do that, but simply assumes that the faithful know that there is indeed a god.  The funny thing is that Ruse himself doesn’t accept gods.

What Ruse has done here is ask questions that science can’t answer, and will later claim to show that religion can. One can add others: “Is Tolstoy better than Dostoyevsky?” “Should I have steak or chicken?”, and so on. And indeed, religion can address the four questions given above, but it cannot provide widely-agreed-on answers, not like science can about questions like “How does DNA lead to the manufacture of proteins?”

Finally, Ruse shows how Christianity (why does he ignore other faiths?) answers these questions. I won’t go into the answers, as those who were previously Christians, or who want to take issue with the answers, can weigh in below:

CHRISTIAN ANSWERS

There is no great secret about what I am going to say next. I did not choose my four questions deliberately with the next move in mind. But obviously, as I was choosing them, I realized what the next move would be. The questions are questions that go right to the heart of the Christian religion (McGrath 1997; Davies 2004). They do not cover all of the religion, obviously. They say nothing about the Trinity. But they do ask about matters central to the life and thought of the believer. And moreover, thanks to Christianity, they are questions to which the believer thinks that he or she has the answer. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because God, a being who exists necessarily, created heaven and earth as an act of divine goodness. For no other reason, nor is other reason needed. What are the foundations of morality? They are grounded in the will of God. They are that which He had decreed we should do. What is the nature of mind? Being created in the image of God. What is the point of it all? That we should enjoy eternal life with God, our Father.

Well, Christians may or may not be satisfied by these answers, but they surely will differ among Christians, and especially among different believers. (Will fundamentalists answer them the same way David Bentley Hart would?) More important, what about those other religions? Ruse completely neglects them in favor of Christianity, yet those other religions will answer the questions differently! How, then, is any believer to be satisfied with his or her answers? Who is right? I suppose to Ruse, it doesn’t matter, for he’s forged some kind of phony concordat by simply bringing up hard or unanswerable questions and saying, “See, religion has answers!” It does offer “answers”, but we don’t know if they’re the right ones.

The note of triumphalism at the end of Ruse’s essay is galling, for he seems to think that he’s really come up with a form of accommodationism that is better and more robust than anyone else’s (he calls it an exercise in “tough-minded” rather than “tender-minded” thinking):

So despite the worries and sneers of the New Atheists, the position I am putting forward is far from one that gives way cravenly to the religious. I am fully prepared to criticize religion, and I do, but not on inadequate grounds. And, thinking that science unaided refutes religion is on inadequate grounds. Conversely, I think I have opened the door for the religious person—the very traditional Christian—to argue for his or her God and the implications without fear that I am allowing only a fairy story to get us to be nice to each other. Were I arguing that way, I would not be promoting accommodationism. I would be cheating.

What I don’t get is Ruse’s claim that he’s “opened the door for the religious person—the very traditional Christian—to argue for his or her God and the implications without fear that I am allowing only a fairy story to get us to be nice to each other.” Without a demonstration of a God to begin with, he hasn’t done that at all, for his tactic is to simply say that if you accept that there is a certain kind of God—the Christian one—some of the unanswered questions suddenly become answerable. If that’s not what he’s saying, then he’s simply saying that the existence of unanswered questions (which somehow derive from science’s use of metaphor) are themselves evidence for a god. But that is a god-of-the-gaps argument, and I don’t think Ruse is going there.

Now, I’ll post this and then go over and look at what Jason said, adding a link after I read his piece.

UPDATE: I see Jason has written a longish reponse to Ruse, and then another post in which he describes how he first decided to publish a rebuttal to Ruse’s piece, but found out that someone had done it. Jason’s response, I’m glad to see, is complementary to mine in a good way, though we agree that Ruse is making god-of-the-gaps arguments. Jason highlights Ruse’s unintended contempt for religion’s inability to answer its questions, which I do allude to above. Jason thinks that, like Gould, Ruse will get his major pushback from religionists rather than scientists, for Ruse appears to say in the piece that religion has nothing to say about realities of the universe.

________

Ruse, M. 2015. Why I am an accommodationist and proud of it. Zygon 50:361-375.

Morality proves God, take #197

May 30, 2015 • 12:00 pm

I’ve written before about National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins’s claim that “the Moral Law”—that is, the instinctive feelings of right and wrong we experience when, say, we see a drowning child or a cheater—are evidence for God. For, claims Collins, there’s no way to explain such instinctive feelings by evolution or other naturalistic processes.  In this way Collins, an evangelical Christian, violates his own admonition to fellow believers to avoid god-of-the-gaps arguments.

The Argument for God from Morality is common, and, as I show in FvF, deeply flawed. Plato’s Euthyphro Argument kills dead any claim that morality derives from God. And even if it did, what do we do with the bullying, misogynistic, homophobic, rape-and-genocide-approving God of the Old Testament? Did He change his mind some time during the last 6000 years? In the end, we can see that religion can serve only as a sustainer or reinforcer of morality that comes from sources other than God. It can indeed serve this function for some people, but the observation that diverse religions promote drastically different (and often conflicting) moral codes puts paid to the notion that there is a universal religious morality.

My view is that morality is a combination of evolved feelings that were adaptive for our ancestors who lived in small social groups, overlain with a veneer of largely consequentialist morality that comes from our evolved reason. That is, we can figure out ways to behave that are good in our modern society, which explains why what is considered “moral” changes over time. (Religion can’t explain that without invoking secular reason.)

At any rate, a friend who will remain unnamed told me that I should pay attention to the website The Conversation, which, he said, published good and thoughtful stuff.  Well, it might, but he then pointed me to an article called “Morality requires a god, whether you’re religious or not,” by Gerald K. Harrison. My friend, who’s an atheist, thought the article deserved a look, but it was so dreadful, so ridden with holes, that it’s put me off the whole website. What kind of intelligent website would publish an argument that I’ll present briefly below, and argument that would be graded “F” by a first-year philosophy student? Moreover, its author, Gerald K. Harrison, works at a secular university, Massey University in New Zealand, and if he teaches this stuff to his students I’d be appalled.  It simply goes to show you that, contra Massimo Pigliucci, someone with real philosophy credentials (Harrison has a philosophy Ph.D. from Durham University) can be taken apart by a mere biologist, or by anyone who reads his website!

The argument proceeds via four assertions, each deeply flawed (the indented text is Harrison’s):

  1. Moral commands are commands.

Take moral commands. It is trivially true that a moral command is a command. A command is a command, right? It is also true that commands (real ones, rather than apparent or metaphorical ones) are always the commands of an agent, a mind with beliefs and desires. My chair cannot command me to sit in it. And commands cannot issue themselves. It follows that moral commands are the commands of an agent or agents.

They are not commands in the traditional sense, but feelings or opinions that guide your behavior. And, like the feelings of hunger or love, they need not be “issued by an agent”.  They can be evolved feelings and emotions, and then who is the “agent”? Natural selection? Or, they can be arrived at by reason, and reason is the result of cogitation involving experience, genes, and the influence of others.  The use of the word “agent” here is of course designed to make us think that there is a god behind it all. This is reinforced by his point #2.

2. Only agents can issue commands – so moral commands are the commands of an agent or agents. 

Many philosophers maintain that moral commands are commands of reason. They are right, I think. But the point still stands. Reason’s commands are commands. Therefore, reason’s commands are the commands of an agent or agents.

This is verging on lunacy.  We have feelings about all kinds of things, many instilled by natural selection. We feel love and kinship, for instance, and those aren’t different in substance (or origin, I think) from moral feelings. Is there an agent telling you to fall in love, or feel closer to your own children than to other peoples’? Is there an agent commanding you to solve a math problem using reason?

3. Moral commands have an external source – so moral commands are the commands of an external agent or agents. 

We are agents. Could moral commands be our commands? That does not seem plausible. For one thing, it would mean we could make anything morally right just by commanding ourselves to do it. That doesn’t appear to work – and we can test that easily enough. Command yourself to do something that has hitherto seemed obviously wrong to you – physically assaulting someone, say – and see if it suddenly starts to seem morally right to assault someone now.

But of course if moral feelings come from evolution, reason, and what we’re taught by others, then they derive from either natural selection promoting specific feelings or are the byproducts of reason and emotions that derive from natural selection. In other words, they’re coded in our neurons, which are built by our genes and our environments. Just because you can’t make yourself feel differently about what’s “right” (and I’m not sure you can’t, given the way people resolve cognitive dissonance), doesn’t mean that there are one or two people out there making you feel the way you do. If moral feelings are internalized, then of course they’ll be hard to dispel. But you see where Harrison’s going here: the external agent will be God. Harrison has already decided what he wants to show before he starts his argument, and hasn’t considered alternatives. This is one way that his piece differs not only from secular philosophy, but from good philosophy.

4. All moral commands have a single source across all of us and all time.

Another basic truth about moral commands (and the commands of reason more generally) is that they have a single source across all of us. This can be demonstrated by the fact that “Tim is morally commanded to X” and “Tim is morally commanded not to X” are clearly contradictory statements. They cannot both be true.

Yet, there would be no necessary contradiction if moral commands could have different ultimate sources. And as those statements contradict each other whenever or wherever they are made, moral commands must have a single unifying source across all space and time.

Well, sadly, different people are “commanded” to do different things. In Saudi Arabia, people are “commanded” to kill apostates, gays, and infidels, and to stone adulterers. In the U.S., we are “commanded” (well, most of us) to leave such people alone, and to treat gays, women, and unbelievers as equals, or at least not kill them. That alone contradicts proposition #4, but maybe I am misunderstanding what Harrison is saying here. If there is a single unifying source of morality, that single source gives different people and different societies different commands, and moreover those commands also change over time (viz., compare the Old Testament versus now).

5. Ergo, God.  

We are heavily influenced by moral commands and other commands of reason. Thus, this single agency is immensely influential. Moral commands are, then, the commands of a unique, external, eternal agent who has colossal influence over virtually all of us.

It is no abuse of the term to describe this agency as a kind of god. Thus, the commands of morality (and the commands of reason more generally) require a god because they are, and can only be, the commands of one.

If that’s not philosophical weaseling (really? “kind of god”?), I don’t know what is. Harrison hasn’t even proven a single agent issuing “commands,” much less that moral feelings even are “issued commands” or that there is one external source of those commands across all time. (What happened to “agent or agents”? Why couldn’t the “commands,” if they exist, be issued by a committee of gods.)

Harrison then asks, “but what if there are no gods”? Good question! His argument falls apart completely if there is no god, for then we simply wouldn’t have moral feelings and we’d all be killing and looting in the streets. Fortunately, Harrison has a kicker here:

6. Reason requires a god, too.  (JAC’s words).  Harrison says this:

Well, if that is the case [if there are no gods] all moral and rational appearances constitute illusions and all our moral beliefs are false. Happily, however, there seems no rational way to reach this conclusion. If the commands of reason really do require a god, then that god exists beyond reasonable doubt.

For any argument that sought to show that a god does not exist would have to appeal to some commands of reason, and thus would have to presuppose the existence of the very thing it is denying. The same applies to any argument that seeks to show that the commands of reason do not exist in reality. All such arguments undermine themselves.

Thus, if the commands of reason are – and can only be – the commands of a god, then that god exists indubitably.

There are of course ways to determine if beliefs have the intended consequences, and to do that rationally. If we are consequentialists, and see morality as producing certain results in society, well, those moral “commands” can be tested.  And notice the segue he makes between “moral commands” and “commands of reason.” Those are not equivalent, nor has he shown them to be. He’s just slipped in another assumption here—that reason comes only from God. But of course reason can come from natural selection and experience as well, so there’s another alternative Harrison hasn’t considered.

I don’t want to go further; the argument above is a hash of false assumptions, seasoned with a failure to consider alternative explanations. The whole argument is simply confected a posteriori to arrive at Harrison’s preferred conclusions.  Anybody with two neurons to rub together can give alternative explanations for moral sentiments that have a purely secular basis.

If this is the rigor of Harrison’s thinking, I feel sorry for his students at Massey.

 

 

Once more with feeling: final thoughts on Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum #MarRef

May 29, 2015 • 4:08 pm

by Grania Spingies

Terry Pratchett once wrote:

“Words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone’s mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.”

Pratchett was right, of course. I don’t think the Vatican can help it much, for Terminal Foot-In-Mouth Disease seems to be afflicting many high-ranking members of the clergy. Hot on the heels of Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin denouncing Ireland’s “Yes” result in its Marriage Equality Referendum as a “disaster for humanity”, we have another senior cardinal, Raymond Burke, pronouncing Ireland as “worse than Pagans and “defying God”.

I’m at risk of appearing obsessive about the subject, so I will try to make my final points and then bow out as gracefully as possible.

First, yes, they really believe this stuff.
 
These men may represent the Old Guard of the Catholic Church, but as Cardinals they can hardly be called radical outliers. Yet their pronouncements are fairly extreme. Whether the issue is born of a desire to arbitrate morality or to maintain a position of power over peoples’ lives; the result is the same: they are aghast at the notion that anybody – let alone a nation of mostly Catholics – could even contemplate same-sex marriage as an issue of equality. The legal rights aspect of the recent Referendum is something that doesn’t appear to register at all in their counter-arguments.

The vote comprehensively rejected the Church position. That ought to cause concern among the clergy, and it clearly does in the case of Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin as it doesn’t bode well for the future of the religion. But even Martin’s comments didn’t show that he might be reconsidering whether his Church’s position was wrong, merely that it had clearly failed to impress its position on its members.
 
Its official position, lest we forget, is this:

Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

This quote is not from some hard-line lunatic fringe. It is from the Catholic Catechism on the Vatican’s own website.

This is why weirdly offensive letters were written by Bishops to be read to the faithful of Ireland at Mass during the Sunday Homily. However progressive and liberal the local parish and its priest may be, there is no getting around what the Church actually has to say about homosexuality.

Second, they are so out of touch with people that they have no idea how unintentionally funny and simultaneously insulting they are.
 
I think I can speak for everybody here when I say being called “worse than a pagan” is not the worst thing one can be called in life, nor is it likely to cause most atheists a moment’s pause. However, one has to remember that the overwhelming majority of people voting Yes in the Irish Referendum were Catholics. Those Catholics presumably do have an opinion about being told that they have defied God for ratifying the idea that people are entitled to equal rights regardless of their sexual orientation. These sorts of pronouncements do the Church’s reputation a great deal of harm, so it’s telling that even now the Vatican permits its leading men to tell the world how they really feel rather than instructing them to maintain a dignified silence on an issue where they cannot fail to look archaic, intolerant and downright offensive. Gay Catholics who were hoping for the Church to start moving towards a more progressive and tolerant position must be profoundly disappointed and wary. 

Third, they fear the Internet
 
This is either because the Internet is the plaything of demons, or because it gives every Catholic access to opinions and ideas that may not coincide with those of the Church. With the Vatican going to enormous trouble to put an exorcist into every parish in the world, it is not impossible that it is the former that worries them the most as if the world were literally an episode of Supernatural, only with slightly less subtext.

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Realistically, it is also because ideas have to fight hard for credibility when they are forced to go up against a world of alternative ideas. “Because the book says so” is a pretty useless argument when your opponents also have books that say different things. However, it is pretty hard to exorcise the Internet, so it seems that people will “imbibe this poison that’s out there” and will ask harder questions and make better arguments. Terrible stuff really.
 
Fourth, they have no intention of changing the Church’s position
 
In spite of recent papal soundbites along the lines of “Who am I to judge?”, the official Church position is going to be difficult to alter or undo—assuming of course that those in power have any intention of changing the status quo. Religions are not democracies, and popular vote is not generally an option. Liberal academic Catholics can point to sound analyses of scriptures that show the original texts are not a particularly good source for justifying the intense homophobia displayed in the official Catholic position. Unfortunately, the usual reaction from the Vatican on this sort of issue is to completely ignore the arguments made, or as last resort to point out: “There seems to be a certain element who think that the Synod has the capacity to create some totally new teaching in the Church, which is simply false.”

I’ve never been so proud of Ireland as when the Yes result came in on Saturday 23rd May; even though I think that equality is something that shouldn’t even have been put to the vote in the first place. Nevertheless, Ireland was wonderful in every possible way. It’s not going to change the Catholic Church’s position. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, because Ireland is already changed in the very best way and the battle about morality and equality has already been won. I’ll leave you with this quote from the  heart-warming piece by Irish blogger and journalist Donal O’Keeffe on his experiences canvassing for the Marriage Equality referendum.

Then two young men, walking close together, came toward me from Rory Gallagher Plaza. “Hello,” I said. “Are you voting on Friday?” They gave me the most beautiful smiles and held up their joined hands.
I thought that was a really mean thing to do, to make a grown man cry in public like that.