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What’s Your Basis for ‘Reason’ and ‘Morality?’
A Catholic cathedral in France taken by my nephew Luke Renoe. This visual art hangs in our home, a marker of transcendence.
Now those who follow me on social media, my websites, and teaching videos know that I have deep respect for other points of view. But everyone who knows me also realizes that my first response will always be to ask straightforward questions. So here are the questions I would ask Kate Cohen.
“How do you define ‘reason’ and ‘morality?’” “What is the source or origin of those concepts, ‘reason’ and ‘morality’?’” And most important of all “Who gets to answer these questions, then, apply them?” Again, those who know me know that these are questions I ask everyone all the time, whether in high school, undergraduate, Ph.D. studies, or casual conversation.
And my answer will always be the same: the standard for ‘reason’ and ‘morality’ must have a transcendent source. If there is no outside, supernatural origin for decision-making about right and wrong, then we are left with human definitions, sources, and decision-makers. And if we are left solely with humans at the helm we are left with a haunting question, “Who will decide which humans decide and how will those decisions be made?”
Published in General
If you don’t know which of your moral judgments are not right, they aren’t much of a basis for condemning God are they? Your intuition might be wrong and God right in every case you disagree with Him. Also, I’m interested in a case when you decided a moral judgement was incorrect and you corrected it, if you could give an example.
Ok, cool.
Now do you actually care about that specific issue with respect to the Bible? I ask because at least twice in this thread you’ve pulled back from someone talking about Bible issues and said something about much more general questions instead.
Sure. But my belief that telling people to kill infants and children is immoral isn’t one of those beliefs that I think is a close call.
Also, I don’t think I disagree with God on the issue of killing infants and children. I think it’s very likely that God doesn’t exist at all. And if God does exist, it’s very likely that the person who wrote about God commanding the Israelites to kill infants and children was just inventing the story, not recounting an event that actually happened.
I used to be opposed to same sex marriage. I voted in a referendum against same sex marriage. If I had to vote on same sex marriage again, I would vote in favor of same sex marriage.
If you are nothing more than a puppet dancing on the end of strings made by DNA, where do you obtain anything resembling a moral outlook?
I care about that specific issue in the sense that I think it illustrates the weakness of Divine Command Theory in moral philosophy. It’s an example of God, hypothetically, giving a command to people to do something that appears to be very immoral.
Now, to be fair, human beings are tribal by nature. So, killing people in the other tribe is very common in human history. So if enslaving people from the other tribe.
It seems like you care about issues you think you can find with DCT, but only as long as we keep it general. You seem reluctant to investigate whether the issues even apply to Christianity specifically.
From my brain, which consists of a complex neural network. If I had the brain of a housefly, which still has about 200,000 cells, I wouldn’t be thinking about moral philosophy.
It seems like there is a variety of moral viewpoints among people who profess to be Christian. Some Christians have told me they support same sex marriage while other Christians have told me that they oppose same sex marriage. Similarly for birth control, divorce, marrying outside the Christian faith and other issues.
So, do you have a specific moral issue in mind or a specific biblical passage?
That’s not all that impressive. Charles Manson had one of those.
Another step away from specific issues. If you can make a generalized statement to avoid ruling on a specific issue, you make it.
No. We were talking about your issues with religion. If you don’t have any in mind, then you’re wasting my time and yours. I don’t care at all about armchair philosophy about general issues with DCT that may or may not mean anything once we look at a specific religion. I care very much about the facts of my own religion.
It sounds like your moral intuitions cover a grade from more to less certain. What is the basis on which you judge the more certain from the less certain?
Are you saying that your moral intuition on same sex marriage changed? What made it change?
Having a large brain isn’t impressive. But not having one, like a housefly, makes moral deliberation impossible. Or maybe houseflies do discuss meta-ethics in their leisure time.
At some point I concluded that having same sex marriage, at least as a civil-governmental matter, would likely result in more human happiness than if our society didn’t have same sex marriage.
That said, I didn’t like the US Supreme Court making same sex marriage legal in all 50 states. That, to me, was an example of the judiciary usurping legislative power.
There are some variants of Christianity that do seem harmful to the people in those religious sects. I remember reading, a few years ago, a book by Megan Phelps-Roper, who grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. This was the church that would protest military funerals with signs that said, “God hates fags.”
They would also hold signs that said, “Thank God for September 11.” They would even praise God for allowing famine to strike certain parts of Africa because they, as Calvinists, believed that all of these events were evidence of a sovereign God.
This extreme variant of Christianity did seem to warp the minds of those captivated by it. Eventually, though, Megan Phelps-Roper de-converted from Christianity and has rejected many of her prior beliefs. Her family will not talk to her (except for other members of the family that de-converted, of course).
It looks to me like you’re doing the same thing again. You look at specific examples only to illustrate some extremely general point and avoid any responsibility for looking at the facts themselves.
Not one fact of my religion is affected by whether some Christians are jerks in such-and-such a way, or whether some people calling themselves “Christians” are jerks. If you can find something that 90% of Christians believe, or something in the Bible, or something in the Creeds, or something in Mere Christianity by Lewis, or something in any two of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Edwards, then you may have some fact of my religion that I have some business giving a darn about.
I just don’t care about your general issues with religion. I care about the facts of a specific religion, particularly my own.
What if they were all zombies? But seriously, what if they were all genetically corrupted with inhuman genes?
So your moral intuitions are based on the greatest happiness for the greatest number? I’m just trying to find out exactly how your moral judgements are made. In an earlier comment you wrote that your moral intuitions were the bottom line in your moral judgements. What you are writing here sounds like that is not the case, that you judge your moral intuitions on the utilitarian principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Is that right?
I don’t know if I would put it exactly that way. But just as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence of “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” I do think that minimizing suffering, maximizing happiness, maximizing liberty and maximizing health and flourishing are important considerations. Perhaps there are other considerations that I have not thought of.
So, if by making one person supremely miserable, you made everyone else better off, that would be moral?
No. A thought experiment where a person is in a physician’s waiting room and the physician has 5 patients, each needing an organ transplant. So, the question is whether the person sitting in the waiting room should be killed to have his organ harvested to benefit the 5 people in need of them.
The problem is that if such a policy were accepted, it would result in more insecurity among everyone because society would no longer respect each person’s ownership of his or her own body parts. Everyone would have to hide from everyone else for fear that their body parts might be harvested next.
That’s why autonomy-liberty has to be a central feature of a good society. It demonstrates why communism failed so badly.
Well that’s ok. More of a problem for me is I’m getting no clear statement on how you form moral judgements. It started with moral intuitions as the bottom line, then we went to some moral intuitions are in some way more certain than others, then to maximizing happiness, and now the inclusion of minimizing suffering and maximizing health. With the proviso that other considerations might be tossed in. In light of this, I don’t know what to make of your moral judgements of God because how you make moral judgements is still as mysterious to me as it was a dozen comments ago.
Your thought experiment is too narrow.
We have been having this conversation about moral judgments on a very abstract level. So, I have tried to include all of the “inputs” that would go into me making my moral judgments.
And by the way, I think most people do value things like happiness, reducing suffering, increased freedom, increased health, life expectancy and flourishing. I also think that most people do use their subjective frame of reference (their intuition) as they grapple with various decisions.
As for my moral judgments of God, I think most people would find a command to kill infants and children to be immoral if they thought that the command was issued by, say, some person who lived in their community. Now, if you say that God issued the command to kill infants and children, some people (though not all) would change their mind and think, “Well if God said it was okay, then it was okay.”
But I think it’s better to think about the substance of the action in question than the person who commanded the action. If it’s immoral for me to tell someone to kill infants and children then it’s probably immoral for a powerful CEO to order people to kill infants and children. And its probably immoral for God to order people to kill infants and children.
I didn’t come up with this thought experiment. I saw it on a moral philosophy video where they discussed meta-ethics.
My students are always giving me knee-jerk distinctions between what they think utilitarianism is and what they think deontology is. Like this very thought experiment. And Trolley Problems.
It’s annoying. I tell them to read Mill instead of whatever summaries of moral philosophy they find on the internet. As a rule, they never get utilitarianism right thinking that way They always ignore things like what you hit on here: the long-term consequences of making it ok to kill innocent people.
Good job.
It seems to me that in this thought experiment four people out of five would experience more security in that they know they will live years instead of months. And within the society every one knows that four out of every five people will live rather than have five out of five people die. This is the problem with thought experiments: they are all divorced from the real world and are only imaginings.
Its not the inputs I’m interested in so much as the method of analysis. There are a number of different inputs, intuitions, and principles (like maximizing happiness) that get tossed into the pot and stirred, and then a moral judgement pops out. What’s still mysterious is how the inputs are analyzed.
Thats probably true, but of what significance is that? Are you saying that popularity is another input into your moral analysis? Would boiling babies still be wrong if everyone on Earth approved of it?
Those are interesting “probables” you wrote in there. You went from it being definitely immoral for you to do it to only being probably immoral for a CEO to do it. Why isn’t it just as definitely immoral for a CEO to do it as you? Does being CEO confer some sort of moral license?
I don’t think so. You and the CEO are equivalent moral agents. Not God, though. There is a difference in kind between the moral agent of the Creator vs creatures. God, for one thing, is the Author of life and death, while we are only subjects of life and death.
It’s not clear to me why an immoral action become moral simply because the identity of the actor changes. If it’s wrong for me to tell people to kill infants and children, it’s wrong for God to tell people to kill infants and children.
You have a very warped moral compass, one that believes that if you are powerful enough you can command people to kill infants and children, as was depicted in the Bible.
I’ll mention this again.