Is Morality Declining in America? Most Americans Think So

A new survey has found that a majority of Americans think America is morally declining:

'In the poll, taken in early May, 72 percent of respondents said that “the state of moral values” in America is “getting worse.” Only 22 percent said it is “getting better.”'

That's good news and bad news.

The bad news is that the majority of Americans are right about the decline in morality. The good news is that they still have enough sense of morality to know that it's declining.

As I pointed out in my essay earlier this year in Canon and Culture, it's the point at which you start feeling warm that is the signal you are about to freeze to death. At least Americans are still moral enough to realize how threatened their morality is.

Morality of the Gaps: Ariel Castro appeals to science in saying he's not to blame

Ariel Castro was sentenced today to 1,000 years in prison without parole. He insists he did nothing wrong and blamed his crimes on "sex addiction." This is a classic case of the psycho-sophistical blame shifting that goes on in a society that gives easy credence to every scientistic pronouncement.

Castro can point to numerous radio and television shrinks (and seemingly most of the more conventional practitioners of this modern art) to justify his claim that, because he suffers from a psychological disease, he cannot be blamed--and should not be punished--for holding three women as virtual sexual slaves in his house for over ten years and forcing the death of the unborn child of one of the women.

"I'm not a monster," he said. "I'm sick."

Let's just remember what people like Dr. Phil said when Arnold Schwarzenegger was found to have had fling with the maid (and what others said about Tiger Woods when it was revealed that his skills at cavorting rivaled his golf abilities): He was suffering, he said on CNN one night, from "sex addition." When questioned as to whether this excused him from blame, Dr. Phil adamantly denied it did. But he was just talking out of both sides of his mouth.

Either it is a disease or it isn't. If it is, then the actions resulting from it are not voluntary, since diseases are not voluntary, and are therefore immune from blame or punishment. If it is not, then he cannot be excused. The Dr. Phil's of the world want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to cast themselves as scientists with the specialist's ability to divine the causes behind things, but also want to be able to deny the clear implication of they say because it would not be well-received from a public that had better be kept in the dark about the real implications of these beliefs.

Surely there are other, better-qualified people the media could consult when these kinds of issues come up.

I'm thinking of witch doctors here.

Once again, we have to go back to the common sense psychology of Aristotle to make sense of the tendency of people like Ariel Castro to shift blame to something or someone else.

Let's review for a minute. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle identifies the seven reasons people do things. Four of them are voluntary and three of them are involuntary:

With a little help from their psychologist friends, people like Castro try to move their actions from the left side of this chart (where they are responsible for their actions) to the right side (where they are not). This is what goes on with the legal insanity defense and, on the broader culture front, in the claim that homosexuality is somehow inborn. In both these cases, the actions of individual are cast as being outside the realm of moral judgment.

Human actions traditionally considered culpable are not moral conditions to be repented of; they are medical conditions to be cured.

In fact, all human behavior, we are led to believe, can be explained scientifically--if only we had adequate technical knowledge at our disposal. And the scientific explanation, being a scientific explanation, will of necessity exclude any moral cause, since a moral cause is necessarily non-scientific.

And the thing is, it is not just Arnold Schwarzenegger's dalliances or Tiger Woods bimbo eruptions that such people would explain away, but every human action. The goal of scientism is to eliminate the idea of voluntary action altogether. Scientific materialism, if it is consistent, cannot consider any action as voluntary. It must necessarily believe that every action is involuntary because it is caused exclusively by prior physical causes.

Religious believers are castigated by their atheist critics for believing in a "God of the gaps"--a God who serves in the role of stopgap explanation for any phenomenon that doesn't yet have a scientific explanation. But more and more unexplained phenomena are explained every day so that, if we follow the trajectory of the success of scientific explanation we can project a time in which we will have no need of God as an explanation for anything since everything will have a non-divine explanation.

The psychological explanations now proffered for the behavior of people like Ariel Castro are part of a larger movement to eliminate morality as an explanatory force altogether. It is a "Morality of the gaps" that involves the belief in actions that are caused by human wills outside the control of physical forces that will one day be explained by psychology.

This is why the logical positivists of the early and mid-20th century wanted to classify morality under psychology: because they considered it to have no independent explanatory existence.

In other words, Ariel Castro is no worse than the rest of us and the rest of us are no better than Arial Castro.

And if you don't like to hear that, don't blame me. Remember, I'm not responsible form my actions either.

Congressman Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Sin and Love Psychology

There are apparently a bunch of people out there who are still under the impression that people can be blamed when they do something wrong.

When it was found out that New York Congressman Anthony Weiner had sent sexually explicit text messages to several girls, one of whom whom was only 17 years-old, you would have thought the Moral Majority had been brought back to life or something. For just a moment, it seemed as if we turned into a nation of school marms.

Never has so many people wagged so many fingers in one direction at one time--all because of what one congressman wagged and then broadcast from his cellphone camera.

Did these people not get the memo? We don't need sin anymore. We're not living in the Middle Ages. We don't need some absolute moral code that everyone has to abide by. We've got science. We've got psychology. We have explanations now that render these Bronze Age concepts of right and wrong relics of the past:

“Congressman Weiner departed this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person,” said his spokeswoman, Risa Heller. “In light of that, he will request a short leave of absence from the House of Representatives so that he can get evaluated and map out a course of treatment to make himself well.”

There you go. He's sick. You don't hold sick people responsible for their behavior. You let them take leaves of absence so they can go find "professionals," pay them lots of money and then they put labels with scientific sounding acronyms on their actions. And then we let them "map out courses of treatment" for themselves. You've been to the doctor before, you know the routine: you get him to tell you what's wrong with you and then you make the decision on how to cure yourself.

Duh.

“It’s clear he needs professional help and I am glad he is seeking it," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. Democratic former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi too concluded that "his behavior required medical intervention," according to the New York Times.

But despite the fact that there has been widespread acceptance that Weiner is a sick man, it didn't stop some of these same people from calling for his resignation. This makes no sense at all. Are you going to be kicked out of Congress for contracting cancer? Are you going to be booted from the Beltway for getting bacterial pneumonia? Are you going to be forced to flee from Washington when they find out you've got fibromyalgia?

Since when did we blame people for having a disease?

Has everyone forgotten Tiger Woods? Yes, he said he was sorry for sleeping with a different girl every night. Yes, he asked for forgiveness for cheating on his wife. But in the end, he acknowledged that he wasn't really to blame for what he did. He announced he was going into "rehab." Like Wiener, he too had somehow contracted "Sex Addiction."

The cynics will say that Weiner is only trying to escape responsibility for what he did by feigning a psychological illness. They will say that the Dr. Drews and the Dr. Lauras of the world are quacks, feeding the desire of television viewers and radio listeners for a neat scientific explanation for problems that are not really scientific. These are people who really think that we live in some kind of moral universe with fixed standards of behavior; they really believe in the existence of right and wrong.

But these people are clearly delusional and in need of psychological treatment.

Disco Diagnosis: Is Arnold Scharzennegger really suffering from "Love Addiction"?

I would say that now I have heard everything, but, as soon as I say it, I will hear something else from the Men In White Coats that I have not heard before and that I wouldn't have thought that supposedly intelligent people would even have thought of and I will realize once again that I have really not heard everything. They are imaginative people, these people who think everything is analyzable by science.

Today's episode of Let's Apply Science To Something It Has Little To Do With involves Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who, it turns out, fathered a child by a member of his house staff, which has caused the news programs to look for explanations in all the wrong places.

[And I should probably specify here that the person who bore the child was female for the Women's and Gender Studies folks out there who have convinced themselves that men and women aren't really different after all.]

Whenever a public official is found to have committed a moral indiscretion, the news programs call, not on anyone who is an expert in morality, but on someone who is an expert on disease. Instead of a priest, or perhaps an ethicist (a class of people in whose existence I frankly do not believe) they call on a psychologist.

CNN's Anderson Cooper, following the current custom, called in a "Dr. Drew" (didn't catch his full name), whom he pressed for an explanation. Dr. Drew, who has never actually had Schwarzenegger as a patient, much less ever even talked to the man, was in no doubt as to the diagnosis: it was a "classic case," he said, of "Love Addiction."

Now I don't know how they select the names for diseases in psychology, but I'm thinking that there should probably be some requirement that the name of a psychological malady not sound like it might have been the title of a hit song for K. C. and the Sunshine Band.

We first witnessed the descent of psychology into disco diagnosis last year, when the TV shrinks identified Tiger Woods' problem as "Sex Addiction," a diagnosis which Woods gladly accepted (better to have a disease than commit a moral failure) and for which he announced he would seek "treatment."

But it is not only the increasing triviality of the pop psychological diagnosis of wayward celebrities that is remarkable, but the underlying speciousness of the whole enterprise. I have remarked elsewhere regarding the tendency in our culture to try to explain away human moral behavior through scientific hocus-pocus. Aristotle divided the reasons for human behavior (of which he identified seven) into the voluntary and the involuntary. Our entire culture is trying to shift behavior from the voluntary, where we are responsible moral agents, to the involuntary, where we are merely amoral spectators of our own behavior.

You are not responsible for contracting a "disease."

But the Dr. Drews of the world take this process to an even more absurd level. With Anderson Cooper facilitating, the expert somehow managed at one and the same time to excuse Schwarzenegger for his behavior by diagnosing him with a disease ("Love Addiction"), but kept reminding his audience that this didn't make what he did "okay."

Well, if it was a disease, then why wasn't it "okay"? And what exactly does "okay" mean? Why didn't he say, not that it still wasn't "okay," but that it was still "wrong"? Is there something wrong with the word "wrong"?

I have a solution for all the psychological nonsense we get treated to whenever a public official or a celebrity falls from grace.

CNN needs to hire some old, crotchety, no-nonsense priest to come on whenever this happens. Anderson would say, "Father O'Malley, what went wrong here? How could [insert name of latest wayward celebrity] this have happened?"

Then the priest would look at Cooper, shake his head, and say (and I'm thinking an Irish accent would be helpful here), "Anderson, are ye daft? Or mebbe you've been hittin' the bottle again? Why the man's a sinner: that's what's wrong with 'im." Then the priest, who would have an intimate understanding of sin from having heard confessions and prescribed penance for his entire adult life, could explain the finer points of temptation and moral failure, which involve among other things, Getting Down Tonight, which results from a little to much Shaking of the Booty, because That's the Way you Liked It at the time--only later to realize that even your Boogie Shoes are not going help you run away from it.

And then he could assure Anderson that Schwarzenegger's being a sinner doesn't mean what he did was not wrong. And this remark, unlike Dr. Drew's, would have the advantage of not being rationally inconsistent with everything he had just said.

Sam Harris on Morality: More pronouncements from the Englishmen.

I have said before that there is a hierarchy of positions on the issue of how (and whether) moral beliefs can be justified. On the top of the scale is classical religious thought, a scheme of belief in which morality makes complete sense. On the next level down is existentialism, which rightly concludes that if you reject God, then you must also reject morality. And since they reject God, they realize they must reject morality too. It is a mistaken position, but it's at least intellectually consistent.

On the bottom of this hierarchy is the New Atheism, which simply plays pretend and clings, despite no rational justification of its position, that, despite there being no God, there is still morality. The existentialists, being philosophically sophisticated, basically laugh at this position. Nietzsche calls the people who hold it "Englishmen" because he saw the Victorian culture of 19th century Britain doing exactly this.

And how ironic is that? That the New Atheists are essentially recapitulating the Victorian view on morality?

This latter position has now been taken up by people like Sam Harris, the author of Letter to a Christian Nation. I have not read Harris' new book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, and I hope to review it soon. However, his comments describing his argument in the book don't look terribly promising.

Harris first tries to recast the concept of morality in what he calls "flourishing,"and flourishing, he says, "depends on the way the universe is." Therefore (apparently), morality depends on the way the universe is. He argues that because questions of right and wrong are about human and animal well-being, and that human and animal well being depend on certain things in the world that we can study scientifically, that therefore morality can be studied scientifically.

In my book I argue that we can view all possible experience on a kind of landscape, where peaks correspond to the heights of well-being and the valleys correspond to the lowest depths of suffering. The first thing to notice is that there may be many equivalent peaks on this landscape - there may be many different ways for people to thrive. But there will be many more ways not to thrive.

In fact, what he seems to be doing is simply redefining morality, which cannot be scientifically studied, by repackaging it in something called "flourishing," which he defines in such a way that it can be scientifically studied. He then concludes that morality can be scientifically studied. It's sort of a shell game where the pea somehow gets removed from the shell it was originally under.

There are two fallacies that people like Harris commit over and over when they discuss morality, as if committing them enough times somehow made them go away. The first is that think they can cross back and forth over the "is/ought" divide as if it didn't exist, and they never explain how they get from an is to an ought. As David Hume pointed out in the 18th century, you simply can't do it. To conclude anything about what should be on the basis of what is is to commit what other philosophers have since called a "category mistake." It's like saying that 2 + 2 = 4 is purple, or that my appreciation of a song I heard today is three feet tall.

This, by the way, is not a problem for classical morality (i.e., Aristotelian Thomism), since classical morality presupposes formal and final causes. If you believe that things (such as human beings) have a definitive nature and purpose, and that acting in accordance with that nature is what is good, and acting in defiance of that nature is bad, then everything makes sense. But the New Atheists, adopting the modern view deriving from the Englightenment that there are no formal or final causes, have left themselves at the mercy of what has been called "Hume's Guillotine."

The second fallacy Harris and his fellow New Atheists repeatedly commit is the Naturalistic Fallacy, which consists of asserting that you can explain ethics by simply describing the conditions that accompany the quality of goodness. If, for example, pleasure always accompanies virtuous acts, then virtue and pleasure must be the same thing. G. E. Moore articulated the problem with this fallacy in his Principia Ethica in the early 20th century.

It is important to note that Hume and Moore are not Christians or even traditional thinkers: Hume was a British empircist Philosopher (and religious skeptic) and Moore was a modern analytic philosopher.

The more fundamental problem, however, is that the New Atheists are mostly philosophically ignorant and don't even seem to be familiar with the fact that these are problems in the first place. I have yet to hear one of them actually address the is/ought problem or explain how their position on morality avoids the Naturalistic Fallacy. You would think they had never heard of Hume or Moore.

I'm sure Harris is more specific in his book, but it will be interesting to find out whether he tackles these problems head on--or whether he simply ignores them as he has done in all the public statements from him I've seen so far.

Ten animals Ed Brayton would like to ignore

The only thing sillier than some of Christine O'Donnell's statements during her campaign for U. S. Senate in Delaware is some of the responses to her.

Ed Brayton, for example, seems to think it a highly damning critique to lampoon O'Donnell's remarks on certain sexual practices by pointing to the animal kingdom, where those same sexual practices occur, as if the reader is supposed to conclude that this is somehow morally instructive for humans.

I have dealt with this whole line of argument before in "Gay Penguins and the Inductive Argument from Hell": that if we can find animals that do something, we must therefore conclude it's okay for humans. Start down that road and it's interesting what you end up committing yourself to.

Here are ten animals we do not want to emulate:

• Komodo dragons, polar bears, crocodiles, etc. (eat their young)
• Fishing spiders (eat potential mates)
• Bachelor biting midge, female redback spider (eats opposite sex after mating)
• Spotted hyena, seabirds (murders siblings)
• Ichneumon wasp (tortures others insects)
• Hippopotamus (attracts mate by urinating & defecating)

Coming soon: secular rationalists commending cannibalism, fratricide, and torture--along with some fairly exotic dating techniques.

I would also mention the female giant green anaconda, which mates with multiple males at one time, but you never can be sure what interesting inference from their own reasoning these people may already accepted. So why bother. These are people who are pretty far gone, morally speaking, so its getting harder and harder to find something that's outrageous according to their morality (and I use that term loosely)

By the way, why is it always some debased behavior we're supposed to mimic in nature? When was the last time you heard these people pigeons who mate for life, or dogs for their loyalty or bees for their industriousness and arguing that we should emulate them. Why is vice, rather than virtue, the only thing we can learn from nature?

The Failure of Enlightenment Morality, Part CLVII

Adam Gurri has another interesting post on the question of how you can justify morality. He argues against those who believe that in order to have a coherent view of morality, you must believe in God:

They [the people who say this] assume that the existence of God and of morality are logically linked to one another, that morality requires a "bases" or justification of some sort which only God can properly fill the role of ... Belief in the existence of right and wrong and belief in the existence of the divine are two entirely logically distinct concepts ... As a nonrationalist, I see no logical inconsistency in the fact that I don't believe in a divinity but do believe in morality. Nor do I see any logical consistency with any of the other combinations of beliefs on those two topics.

But then he says that he has a problem with the application of reason to the question at all:

They assume that human beliefs are or ought to be logically consistent ... In fact, logic is irrelevant to whether or not I believe in either God or morality. Belief is not arrived at through reason. This isn't a bad thing. In fact, it is impossible for logic to give us a reason to believe in anything.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what he is saying here in regard to the role of reason in moral discourse. If logic is "irrelevant to whether or not I believe in either God or morality," then why should anyone find his point that there is "no logical inconsistency in the fact that I don't believe in a divinity but do believe in morality" persuasive? If logic is not operative in the discussion of the relation between God and morality, then why is the absence of logical inconsistency in a position on this relation commendable?

I agree that "any reason for believing must begin with some non-logical premise," but only because everything must begin with some non-logical premise, including logic itself, which is founded on non-logical foundations. The law of contradiction, for example cannot itself be proven without employing what it is trying to prove. This is the whole idea behind first principles: there are some things you have to accept as axiomatic in order to think at all. But to conclude from this that you can't use reason to resolve important problems is what Chesterton called the "suicide of thought." If logical consistency is not to be the arbiter of whether one's position is a good one or not--in ethics or anything else--then what is? In fact, Gurri employs it to defend his position on morality--even if his position is that logical consistency doesn't matter.

He says that morality is "a part of human nature." I don't see how this addresses the problem of how any moral statement can be considered authoritative over human behavior. On the other hand, I know he has written about his dependence on Hume and Adam Smith. I suspect that Hume's replacement of reason as the relevant feature of human nature with the passions is what is lurking in the background here: morality is what we feel to be right. In taking this position, he seems to be counting on the existence of some set of perennial sentiments that characterize humans, and there are indeed many sentiments that do seem universal across cultures and throughout history (C. S. Lewis' "tao"). On these the Humean theory is unproblematic. But, of course, there are many other things which we would today consider to be unquestionably good (basic human rights) or unquestionably bad (slavery) that Humean ethics simply cannot make sense of, since people have had different sentiments about them over time.

He has jumped out of the rationalist pan and into the emotivist fire.

There were things that Hume took for granted as being "moral" according to his system of ethics based on the passions--just as Kant took many of the same things for granted in his ethics based on reason, like the sanctity of marriage and of keeping your promises--that came into question later.

I share a dissatisfaction with the common Protestant view of ethics. But that isn't the only theistic view of morality. There is the older, classical view in which there is a recognition that there is a divergence between man-as-he-is and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos (i. e., man as he should be), and that the laws or rules of morality consisted in those things that got him from the former to the latter. A classical theist believes that the author of that telos is the best authority to go to to determine what these rules for realizing one's telos are.

The problem with the Humean view of ethics (based on the passions)--as well as the Kantian view (based on the intellect) and the Kierkegaardian view (based on the will)--is ironically tied to the very Protestantism that many secularists now find themselves in conflict with on issues like this. Protestantism, in swallowing the nominalism of William of Occam, denied the existence of a telos inherent in human nature. There is no "man-as-he-should-be"; there is only "man-as-he-is." And therefore there is no need for rules to get him from what he is to what he should be.

Hence the failure of the whole Enlightenment attempt to ground morality in anything whatsoever. As Alastair MacIntyre has eloquently pointed out in his seminal After Virtue, once you have rejected the classical view of inherent nature and purpose in things--and the classical Thomistic synthesis based on it, you foreclose any possibility of any justification of morality at all.

It's all a crap shoot.

Darwinism of the Gaps: Is Hausergate evidence that bad science is heritable?

Evolutionary psychologists will now have to be moved down to a lower branch on the credibility tree thanks to a scandal involving a Harvard professor famous for his research purporting to show that morality is merely a "survival instinct" that has developed over a long period of human evolution. Marc Hauser, the author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, was found by a professional conduct committee of "scientific misconduct" for falsifying data that supported his thesis.

The penchant for trying to explain every human characteristic according to the Darwinian theory is something that has gotten too little attention. When theists try to explain something they don't think science explains, they are accused of engaging in the "God of the Gaps" thinking. What no one seems to have noticed, however, is the reverse tendency: "Darwinism of the Gaps."

Darwinism of the Gaps is the tendency to try to explain any area of human behavior they think theism shouldn't be able to explain by supplying a Darwinian or genetic explanation that, no matter how unlikely or counter-intuitive, is to be preferred over the religious explanation--even if the religious explanation is perfectly reasonable.

Morality, which makes perfect sense according to theism, is just one of these things to be explained by Darwinism, and the criteria these explanations are required to meet seems to be uniformly low. In fact, the only operative criterion seems to be that they exclude the theistic hypothesis.

Even though the scandal has caused a lot of fur to fly among the scientific community, one has to wonder why. What is wrong with falsifying data? Particularly when the whole point of the data which Mr. Hauser falsified was to show that nothing can truly be said to be wrong.

And where does this Harvard committee get off wagging their institutional finger at someone like Hauser? I mean, how long have they been around anyway? Maybe they just haven't been around long enough to have evolved the appropriate moral respect for the falsification of data.

According a Wall Street Journal exposé on the issue, this isn't the first time evolutionary psychology has had to be given time out:

Not so long ago, the initial bloom already was off evolutionary psychology. The field earned a bad name by appearing to justify all sorts of nasty, rapacious behaviors, including rape, as successful strategies for Darwinian competition. But the second wave of the discipline solved that PR problem by discovering that evolution favored those with a more progressive outlook. Mr. Hauser has been among those positing that our ancestors survived not by being ruthlessly selfish, but by cooperating, a legacy ingrained in our moral intuitions.

It is one of the ironies of modern scientific thought that that those most convinced that we got here through a process of the Survival of the Fittest, a process involving competition, would have become so enamored of a theory that posits the Survival of the Nicest, a process involving cooperation.

It's a testimony to the fervor with which they hold to their theory that they would cling to two completely contradictory theses in order to maintain the Darwinian Faith. The irony is particularly marked given the additional Darwinist tendency to accuse those of other faiths of being irrational.

Then again, maybe the penchant for offering contradictory explanations for the positions you hold is an evolved trait which favors the survival of Darwinists.

It's hard to tell.

Should they ban Jeffrey Shallit for bone-headedness?

Jeffrey Shallit at Recursivity complains that he was banned at Doug Groothius' site for being "pugnacious" in making the following comment on a passage Grootius quoted from C. S. Lewis:

Lewis didn't know anything about evolution. He didn't understand that what he called "morality" is a fact about human evolution; that we are programmed by evolution and culture to regard certain behaviors of others as acceptable and other behaviors as less so. Once this is understood, Lewis's confusion simply vanishes.

I don't see what's pugnacious about it. On the other hand, maybe Groothius also has a policy against bone-headedness, in which case I could see how this might violate the policy.

How does Shallit know that Lewis knew nothing about evolution? Has he read Lewis's books to determine this? That can't be, since no one who has read Lewis's books could say such a ridiculous thing about morality.

But Lewis's statements about evolution were tempered with caution on the grounds that he wasn't a scientist. Shallit clearly has no interest in the similar caution about making forays into philosophy, where he clearly is out of his water.

He did, however, pen this poem:

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

In other words, Evolution (Lewis wryly capitalizes the word to indicate the religious fervor characteristic of its adherents) may be the thing that has brought about the complexity of things, but, by the admission of its own supporters, it has, by its very nature, no teleological principles, and therefore cannot be said to "progress," since progress, by definition, is the continuous movement toward some end.

Shallit, of course, thinks just such a thing.

Shallit is a computer scientist. And to someone who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The only question is why Shallit, who thinks morality is just behavior that has been "programmed" into us by evolution and culture, should have any moral objection to Groothius banning him from his blog.

Is it wrong? So what? Some of us have just broken out of Shallit's programmatic moral matrix. Once we have done that, he can have absolutely nothing to say.

And saying nothing would have made a whole lot more sense than what he did say.

Christopher Hitchens issues a challenge

Christopher Hitchens has issued a challenge:

Here is my challenge. Let Gerson [Michael, at the Washington Post] name one ethical statement made, or one ethical action performed, by a believer that could not have been uttered or done by a nonbeliever. And here is my second challenge. Can any reader of this column think of a wicked statement made, or an evil action performed, precisely because of religious faith? The second question is easy to answer, is it not? The first – I have been asking it for some time – awaits a convincing reply. By what right, then, do the faithful assume this irritating mantle of righteousness? They have as much to apologize for as to explain.

The second challenge is not even contested by Christians, so I'm not sure what rhetorical force Hitchens thinks it has. Of course people do evil things in the name of religion: they're sinners.

Likewise, as to the first, of course there are no ethical statements that could not be uttered or done by a nonbeliever. Nonbelievers contradict themselves all the time. The question should be: name one ethical statement that a nonbeliever could not justify rationally given his own unbelieving position. And the answer to that question is: all of them.

The Englishmen are at it again

The atheist scientist P. Z. Myers recently posted some short comments on his view of morality from an atheist perspective--reposted on a Kentucky blog "Blue in the Bluegrass," not one of the more philosophically sophisticated sites in the blogosphere, and one on which the language often used indicates that there may have been a shortage of soap in the home of the proprietor for use in washing out mouths when he was young. But it is fairly representative of the kind of village atheism prominent on the web.

As I have said before, Myers and his ilk are what Friedrich Nietzsche called "Englishmen": like the Victorians themselves, they cling all the more to their own moral positions despite having a philosophy of the world which undercuts any moral judgment whatsoever. The frequency and fervor with which Myers, Jerry Coyne, and Ed Brayton issue moral condemnations of their detractors is a wonder to behold--party on account of the sheer energy that animates them and partly because of the audacity with which they pursue them despite their own stated beliefs.

Nietzsche, while an atheist himself, had this at least over his modern counterparts: he had the intellectual courage to accept the logical conclusions of his beliefs.

Myers says first:

... science as science takes no sides on matters relevant to a particular species, and would not say that an ape is more important than a mouse is more important than a rock.

Presumably this judgment includes humans, since, according to Myers, they are simply another species closely related to apes. And wouldn't it be fun drawing out the logical implications (as I have done elsewhere) for human rights from that position? But, of course, that men are no different from animals doesn't stop Myers and his atheist friends from complaining about men being treated like animals (particularly if the offenders are religious people).

Exactly how do you get a morality in which human beings have an obligation to treat each other humanely in a system of belief in which human humans are not different qualitatively from animals? In fact, this theme figures prominently in atheistic ethics:

What science is, is a policeman of the truth. What it's very good at is telling you when a moral decision is being made badly, in opposition to the facts. If you try to claim that homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural, science can provide you a long list of animals that practice homosexuality freely, naturally, and with no ill consequences.

Let's see if we've got this straight:

It is natural for animals to engage in homosexuality
Humans are animals
Therefore, it is natural for humans to engage in homosexuality

If this logic is acceptable for homosexuality, then why isn't it acceptable for other common animal practices, such as, say, cannibalism (see here for a broader discussion of this point)?

It is natural for animals to engage in cannibalism
Humans are animals
Therefore, it is natural for humans to engage in cannibalism

Now I'm not saying that atheists are cannibals; I'm just saying that I wouldn't turn my back on them.

To Myers, there is no grand overarching morality:

"Science", if we're imagining it as some institutional entity in the world, really doesn't care -- there is no grand objective morality, no goal or purpose to life other than survival over multiple generations, and it could dispassionately conclude that many cultures with moral rules that we might personally consider abhorrent can be viable.

So if there is not "grand objective morality," what kind of morality can there be? Well, after basically pulling the rug out from anything that could possibly exercise an authoritative hold over human action, Myers attempts to come up with one:

However, I would suggest that science would also concede that we as a species ought to support a particular moral philosophy, not because it is objectively superior, but because it is subjectively the proper emphasis of humanity...and that philosophy is humanism. In the same way, of course, we'd also suggest that cephalopods would ideally follow the precepts of cephalopodism.

So don't look to science for a moral philosophy: look to humanism. Humanism says that we should strive to maximize the long-term welfare and happiness of humans; that we should look to ourselves, not to imaginary beings in the sky or to the imperatives written down in old books, to aspire to something better, something more coherent and successful at promoting our existence on the planet.

It causes visions of hand-holding atheists singing whatever it is they sing in place of Kumbayah, doesn't it? What relationship does humanism have to science? What is humanism? Why does humanism have any moral authority over humans? Myers doesn't say.

How can the Myers of the world consider any "particular moral philosophy" as superior to another without a "grand objective morality" to adjudicate between the two? Myers doesn't say. He just takes a leap of faith of the same kind he customarily condemns in others.

Since man is inherently religious, once he dispenses with one religion, he has to replace it with another, which is precisely what humanism is: a religion for people who claim not to have one.

Myers, by simply invoking the name of "humanism," then turns around and starts recounting what humanism "says." Humanism "says" something? Was this, like, handed down from some atheist Sinai? Where is the body of humanist "sayings"? Are they in a book? Who wrote it? Some human? Some group of humans? Where do they derive their moral authority?

Where does humanism "say" we should "strive to maximize the long-term welfare and happiness of humans"? How do we know humanism doesn't command us to eat each other? Where would we go to settle these questions?

Myers remarks would be laughed out of any serious academic philosophical discussion of ethics, but he seems somehow to consider it some kind of significant contribution to ethics. He should just come out and admit that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Tiger Woods and the Modern Ideology of Irresponsibility

I have said little on this blog about the Tiger Woods situation, largely because I thought there really wasn't much to say. The guy cheated on his wife and she threw him out. There's nothing much to say in terms of what he should do about it other than to stop doing it, say you're sorry, and try to do better.

This process was based on the traditional Christian idea--to put it in technical theological terms--of admitting that you're a dirtbag, asking for forgiveness for being a dirtbag, and changing your cheatin' dirtbag ways.

Now there are other ways, of course, of dealing with shame. In Japan, for example, the Samurai ideal has often been pursued: the person ritually disembowels himself. Tiger obviously calculated that this method had little to commend it in terms of the possibility of long-term rehabilitation.

There are, however, newer means of dealing with shame. I have mentioned one of these several times on this blog, which consists of announcing, at the height of the controversy over your behavior, that you are gay. This method I have labeled "The Gay Pass." This was employed in the case of former Congressman Tom Foley. It was also attempted by former New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey. Tiger could simply have come out and said, "I am a gay man." But this would have been difficult to establish, since all of the parties who directly participated in Tiger's infidelity were female. What might have happened if he had run out of females--and reports suggest he may have almost exhausted the available population--is uncertain.

Among the newer ways of dealing with shame is the Therapeutic Method. This is the one more and more Americans seem to choose when faced with public shame, and it was the one utilized by Woods. Under the Therapeutic Method, you wait until you have no choice but to admit your guilt, admit it, and then announce you are going into rehab.

Why has this view become so popular? One reason is probably that we simply view all personal problems therapeutically. We have, in our society, largely abandoned spiritual explanations for things and so, in search of something to replace religion with as an explanation for the way things are, we have resorted to psychology. We dispense with one religion and replace it with another.

But there is another reason we find therapeutic explanations so attractive: they allow us to blame our actions on something other than our own rottenness.

The philosopher Aristotle once pointed out that there are seven reasons people do things: Nature, chance, compulsion, habit, rational impulse, anger, and appetite. The first three of these--nature, chance, and compulsion--are involuntary. The latter four--habit, rational impulse, anger, and appetite--are voluntary to one degree or another. The whole flow of modern explanations of human behavior has, as its, goal, to move as many things from the category of voluntary reasons for behavior to the involuntary.

Let me give just three examples.

The first has to do with the insanity defense in the law. The insanity defense is an attempt by a defense attorney to re-categorize his client's behavior from the column of voluntary actions to the involuntary. If his actions couldn't be helped--if he either couldn't appreciate the criminality of his act or could not conform his behavior to the law--then they are involuntary, and cannot be blamed for them. Nor should he be punished.

If you look around the culture, you see this kind of reasoning everywhere: a persons actions are result of his upbringing, and no more. Movies, television, and books. They attest to the predominance of the view that how we were raised unalterably determines how we will act as an adult. This is one of the reasons, incidentally, that corporal discipline is considered by many today as "child abuse": it can have no other result than the child growing up and beating his own children--or his spouse.

I was beaten as a child, therefore...

In the case of alcoholism, where once an abuser of alcohol was considered a "drunkard," someone with a moral problem, he is now an "alcoholic," someone with a medical problem. Moral problems can be helped; they are voluntary. Medical problems cannot be helped; they are involuntary. To the extent that a person's drinking problem is "alcoholism," it cannot be held against him morally, since, being a diseased person--diseases being involuntary--he cannot be blamed for his actions.

Then there is the case of homosexuality. In order to get out from moral opprobrium for having given oneself over to homosexuality, which is traditionally considered a moral perversion, it had to be re-categorized as involuntary. Homosexuality must now be considered inborn, only then can it be claimed that there are no moral implications to homosexual behavior. "They can't help it," has become the refrain.

What is ironic about the re-categorization of homosexuality as involuntary is that it goes against the almost universal trend in the social sciences to reclassify everything under the voluntary. Everything--gender, masculinity and femininity, even the self--is considered to be socially constructed. To be "male" isn't a function of your chromosomes, but a function of what society has told you you are, an identity you can simply change by rebelling against the social construction that has placed this label on you. Many people don't realize it, but there is a large and vocal faction within the gay scholarly community (a subset of the larger community of postmodern "scholars") that totally rejects the idea that being gay is "inborn." That, they say, is "essentialism," which is anathema to the social constructivism that dominates the postmodernist mindset that, in turn, dominates the social sciences in our universities.

The ideology in the "Women's Studies" department, where social constructivism serves the political agenda, is totally at odds with that over in "Gay Studies," where it doesn't. But they keep the disagreements conveniently behind closed doors in order not to damage the political progress they have made.

But the attraction of blamelessness is strong. The tide of social constructivism has swept everything else away, but the political benefits to be derived from considering homosexuality as involuntary are just too great. This is why Mark Foley and James McGreevey made public statements about being "gay men." Being a gay man is something they couldn't help, and therefore couldn't be blamed for. The behavior they engaged in that prompted them to do it, they implied, was just an aspect of this.

To "go into rehab" is a way of claiming you have a disease that can be "cured." Diseases being things that assail us irresistibly from without, having them is a way of implicitly pointing the finger at someone or something else as the cause of our indiscretions.

How you deal with a problem depends largely on what you think the problem is. And judging from the comments on this story, it seems like the problem the therapists have identified--I'm thinking mostly of the public therapists here: those who have affixed labels to Tiger's problem in the media--is something called "sex addiction."

This term--"sex addiction"--is the perfect therapeutic term. "Infidelity" is an old term fraught with moral implications, useful perhaps in a society in which people are expected to take full moral responsibility for their actions, but which ill serves the modern intent to evade them. Addictions, of course, are diseases, and diseases are involuntary

But didn't Tiger Woods stand up and take responsibility for his actions? What more do we want from him than to stand before the television cameras and say, "I'm sorry," which he did? Isn't that an indication that he is taking responsibility?

The answer to that question is probably, "yes." There's no particular reason to think that Woods didn't really try to take responsibility for his behavior. He didn't create the culture he is in. He didn't invent the idea of "sex addiction." There are others who have done that for him.

Tiger's just a modern guy with modern problems. And he's gone in for a modern cure. Are we blaming him for this? He is, after all, just doing what everyone else does in these circumstances--bowing to the modern therapeutic mindset.

How can it be his fault?

Moral decline? What moral decline?

At least that's the message coming from one analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, an otherwise useful organization whose analysts apparently have had no access to a television set over the last 10 or 15 years, never been past the aol.com home page on the internet, and paid no attention to the redefinition of simple, straightforward meanings of terms like 'marriage' and 'gender'. Here is Paul Wehner at the American Enterprise Institute:

In a recent story in the New York Times, we learned that Dr. James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, is starting a new radio show that will “give him greater leeway to hold forth on politics.” In announcing his new venture on his Facebook page, Dobson wrote, “Our nation is facing a crisis that threatens its very existence. We are in a moral decline of shocking dimensions.”

In fact, a great deal of empirical evidence argues that, if anything, we are in the midst of a social and cultural re-norming of some significance.

A cultural re-norming? You can say that again.

The term 're-norming' comes from the educational testing world, where it means 'dumbing down'. I was having lunch with a regional representative of a prominent national testing company several years back and we were discussing the difference between the older tests her company produced and their newer tests. The newer tests, she said, had been "re-normed."

"Now when you say 're-normed,'" I asked, "that really means that the test has been made easier, right?"

"That's right," she said, not even blinking.

One of the reasons people are not as alarmed about their schools as they ought to be is because the deterioration of academic expectations is so slow that they just haven't noticed the change.

Anyone who got into a time machine and went back, say 20 years--a very short period of time historically speaking, would enter a completely different cultural world. And if you told people then what would be commonly accepted today as cultural commonplaces, they would laugh and tell you that you were some sort of alarmist.

"Re-norming" indeed. Just as test standards are constantly deteriorating--so slowly and unnoticeably that we think the current test scores are comparable to the older scores, so moral standards are deteriorating. And we don't notice the change because we have forgotten what we once thought was the norm.

In fact, one of the measures of our moral decline is that people looking straight at it don't see it. If you don't believe it, just check out Paul Wehner's article.

Roman Polanski is a god, and other observations about whether artists should be expected to act like the rest of us

One wonders about the judgment of the critics of Roman Polanski, the famous cinematic auteur (I would say "movie director," but that would fail to capture the ambiance of the artistic genius of the man). They seem to think that he is somehow subject to the rules by which the rest of us--we mere mortals--must abide.

They forget that Roman Polanski is an artist.

Now this simple truth is being completely ignored by Polanski's critics, who fail to make a distinction between those of here on earth, and those, like Polanski, who inhabit the empyrean heights. He is guilty of raping a 13 year-old girl they say. But what is 'rape'? What is 'guilty'? What is 'a 13 year-old girl'?

These questions arise every time an artist is brought up on charges that concern some incident, usually involving the abuse of children. In recent times, we have endured the controversy surrounding another movie director (if I may use that somewhat mundane terminology): Woody Allen. Allen married one of his movie co-stars, Mia Farrow. He then began having an affair with one of Farrow's children. When the affair was discovered, Allen became incredulous that his behavior was being questioned.

Yes, those of us who dwell here in the sublunary world must be judged by these base standards of decency, but this was Woody Allen we were talking about. What were his critics thinking? Did they think they were dealing with a forklift driver? Did they think it was a controversy about a plumber? Did they think Allen was some plebian with a nine-to-five job who went bowling on Friday night?

You and I may have inhibitions about statutory rape and incest, but we're talking about an artist here.

Then there was Robert Mapplethorpe. Mapplethorpe was a photographer. But not just any photographer, not just some guy who does family portraits who, if he broke statutory rape laws would be put away for the rest of his life. No, sir, he didn't just take pictures: he used the camera to compose. Had Rembrandt been a photographer, he would have ... well, maybe not. Rembrandt didn't paint child pornography. Mapplethorpe did.

But it wasn't child pornography. Yes, it included sexually provocative portrayals of children, and such portrayals are illegal in our world, but these are mortal judgments, inapplicable to such as Mapplethorpe.

Thankfully, Mappelthorpe is no longer composing--only because he is decomposing. He died in 1989. Of AIDS.

If being an artist was not enough to excuse what some base thinkers consider perversion, then his being gay should completely remove any grounds for blame. Being gay, as we all know, excuses all aberrant behavior. Just ask former New Jersey Governor James McGreevey--and former Congressman John Foley.

Which brings us to Polanski. Polanski too is a god, his deity fully evident from his filmography: "Rosemary's Baby," "Chinatown", "Tess," not to mention films such as "Le gros et le maigre," "Les plus belles escroqueries du monde," and "Le locataire." We don't know what these titles mean. Quite possibly, they may be translated "Freddie Krueger's Day Off," "National Lampoon's Paris Vacation," and "Porky's IV," but they are in French, and that is all that matters.

After Polanski's rape of a 13 year old girl in 1977 and his subsequent conviction in California on a lesser charge, he fled the country before sentencing, choosing instead the friendlier shores of Europe, where pedophilia among artists is apparently considered an amusing peccadillo.

Admittedly, the idea that artists should be allowed to ignore common standards of human decency has been questioned. In 1944, the writer George Orwell wrote an essay entitled, "Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali," in which he reviews the autobiography of the famous surrealist painter.

The book, he claims, was quite simply narcissistic, "a striptease act," said Orwell, "conducted in pink twilight." The book's only value, he said, was "as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age."

Orwell catalogs Dali's fond reminiscences of his childhood: kicking his infant sister; flinging a little boy off a bridge; humiliating a girl who loves him for five years, at which point he abandons her--as promised; asking his future wife to kill him after their first kiss. And speaking of his first wife, Orwell points out that, in the course of wooing her, Dali "rubbed himself all over with an ointment made of goat’s dung boiled up in fish glue."

Surely this must have set her heart aflutter.

Oh, and then there was the childhood feat of biting an ant-covered bat in half. Ozzie Osbourne, it seems, was not the original we took him to be.

Orwell notes two things that characterize Dali's paintings: sexual perversity and necrophilia. And then, he adds, in the high tones of the art critic, "there is a fairly well-marked excretory motif." Or, as the artistically primitive observer might say, he likes to paint poop--a tendency that apparently elicited some to ask whether he was coprophagic. It was a false charge, Dali asserted, "but it seems," says Orwell, "to be only at that point that his interest in excrement stops."

If you don't know what 'coprophagic' means, that is probably good. It is best left to the artists.

"Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual," Orwell writes, "but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for."

Then Orwell goes all moralistic on us. Apparently blind to the aesthetic appeal of human feces, he condemns Dali altogether:

The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even—since some of Dali’s pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard—on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.

And then, after this little sermon, Orwell starts declaring victim status, complaining about the kind of condemnation that his own failure to appreciate the finer artistic points of human skulls, putrefying donkeys, and decomposing human corpses has elicited:

If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage. If you say that you don’t like rotting corpses, and that people who do like rotting corpses are mentally diseased, it is assumed that you lack the aesthetic sense.

And the problem is...?

But Orwell is only getting to his main question, in which he impertinently asks where artists get off thinking they should be treated differently than anyone else when it comes to ordinary human morality:

It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word ‘Art’, and everything is O.K.

...In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. If Shakespeare returned to the earth to-morrow, and if it were found that his favourite recreation was raping little girls in railway carriages, we should not tell him to go ahead with it on the ground that he might write another King Lear.

Funny that Orwell mentions rape.

He argues that one has to make a distinction between good art and bad morals, and that sometimes the twain of the two meet, but that such a meeting ought not to confuse us about what we are presented with. Dali, he says, was an accomplished draughtsman whose artistic talent should be appreciated--and a vile human being who ought to be horsewhipped:

...[I]t should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being.

Demanding the recognition that artists are also citizens and human beings? But that would be like saying that we think Roman Polanski is a great filmmaker and at the same time that we think he should be locked up for raping a 13 year-old girl.

And we can't have that.

The Tortured Logic of the New Atheism

Given the number of comments on this post, I have moved it back up to the top of the blog, where it is scheduled to remain until the end of the week. I will also have some comments on this discussion in another post that should be up today and tomorrow.

From the new issue of The Classical Teacher Magazine

The atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once told the story of a cave in the East in which, for many years after the death of Buddha, visitors could still see his shadow:

God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be cast.— And we—we still must vanquish even his shadow!

Nietzsche was wrong about the death of God, but he was realistic about what the rejection of God implied, and he despised those who rejected God but refused to accept the logical implications of that unbelief. He may have been wrong, but at least he was consistent. In particular, he reviled those who rejected Christianity but refused to give up Christian morality. He sarcastically called such people “Englishmen,” because he saw the English of the Victorian period in which he lived as especially guilty of acknowledging the shadow of Christian morality in the wake of the death of the God in whom alone such morality could be justified.

One wonders what choice words Nietzsche would have for the new breed of atheists who now populate the bestseller lists. Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell, and Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great are just several examples of the spate of books by prominent modern atheists, known as the “New Atheists,” that have climbed the bestseller charts with surprising ease over the last two or three years, all of whom purport to reject God, but who nevertheless cling to a form of Christian morality.

Nietzsche is not alone in his assumption that religion and morality are intimately bound together. It has long been assumed by most people that their moral beliefs are dependent upon religious conviction. “If there is no God,” asserts Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamozov, “then everything is possible.” A belief in morality, they think, must be undergirded by a belief in God.

But the New Atheists beg to differ. Morality, they say, has no need of God.

One of the most common problems in argument is agreeing on the question that is really in dispute. There are two ways in which this can be a problem. The first is when the terms are not clear. When we ask whether morality requires a religious foundation, for example, we should be very clear on what we mean by “morality.” Which virtues are we talking about when we ask this question?

There were, in fact, moral beliefs before Christianity came along. There are two kinds of virtue: the cardinal (or classical) virtues: Justice, Prudence, Temperance, and Courage; and the theological (or Christian) virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The first four, the cardinal virtues, not only can be sustained without explicit religious belief; they in fact were. They arose in a world, not without religion, but without religions that said much about morality.

The cardinal virtues have also been called the “practical” virtues. They had mostly to do with getting along in life. The most familiar examples of this were Aesop’s Fables. Aesop was reputed to have been a Greek slave in a Roman household, and the ethics in his stories have to do exclusively with the practical virtues. Faith, Hope, and Charity are absent, but the practical virtues, particularly Prudence, are there in abundance. The tortoise knows the virtue of patience and determination and wins his race with the hare; the crane learns that, in serving the wicked, there is no reward; the boy who cries wolf learns that honesty is the best policy.

All these cases involve sheer self-preservation. This is of the essence of pagan morality: it is exclusively self-preservative or at least self-gratifying (and usually applied only to other members of one’s tribe or race). There is nothing wrong with the practical virtues, as long as we acknowledge them to be incomplete. They may be said to be “rational” virtues in the sense that we can identify reasons for practicing them; namely, that they will help us make it through life with less pain and more pleasure.

But there is nothing in Aesop like the parables of the Good Samaritan, or the Lost Sheep, or the Prodigal Son. The theological virtues are completely different from the practical or classical virtues in this: there is literally no practical reason for them. What purely self-preservative reason is there to act selflessly? Why love your neighbor if you can take from him and benefit yourself? Why would any shepherd, looking to benefit himself, lay down his very life for his sheep?

It is theoretically possible for the practical virtues to be rationally justified without a belief in God. But this is not the case with the theological virtues. The theological virtues cannot survive the abandonment of religion. And yet the New Atheists want to say that they can.

The problem with the atheist’s argument is that it confounds these two kinds of morality—the practical and the theological. A case in point is their argument that morality can be explained through a Darwinist view of evolution: morality, they say, has survivability value. Those who are moral are more likely to survive than those who aren’t. Therefore, those who are more moral are morely likely to survive than those who are less moral.

But how can evolution explain why we should treat others with selfless charity? How can evolution explain the survival value of seeing a beaten and half-dead man at the side of the road who cannot possibly do anything for us, and treating his wounds and taking care of him, and then giving two silver coins to the innkeeper and saying, “look after him”? How can this be said to have any survivability value, and what rational reason can we point to that justifies going and doing likewise?

Evolution cannot explain this.

The second problem in trying to determine the question at issue has to do with how the question is stated. The question is whether an atheist can rationally justify moral belief. The question is not whether athiests can be moral. This is a completely different question.

When, in his chapter, “The Roots of Morality: Why are We Good?,” Dawkins argues that morality is the product of evolution, he completely confuses the two questions. His argument is designed to explain why people are good; not why they should be good. It explains the physical cause, but does not provide the logical ground of their (or our) good behavior. It doesn’t provide a rational ground for being good; it only provides a historical explanation (and not a very convincing one) for why, in fact, we sometimes are.

But the process by which an act comes about can tell me nothing about whether or not it was a good or bad act, since bad acts are brought about by a process just like good acts are. I can explain the physical factors leading up to the Holocaust just like I can explain the physical factors leading up to Mother Theresa’s mission to the poor in Calcutta, India. But the chronology of these two events can tell me nothing about why one is bad and the other is good.

The past arrangement of molecules may tell me something about why I feel a certain way, but it tells me nothing about why I should feel a certain way.

New Atheists like Dawkins are either confused themselves about these distinctions, in which case they are not qualified to talk about morality, or they are clear about the distinctions but are counting on their listeners themselves being confused about them, in which case they are being deceptive.

If I am faced with a situation like that of the Good Samaritan, and I see a man lying by the side of the road who needs help, I can get no help from the argument of Dawkins and the neoatheists. Their theory can tell me nothing about whether I should help the man or whether I should simply go on about my business and not trouble myself with helping him. I can do either one and be justified in knowing that my genes have made me do it.

There are only two logical positions a person can hold on the issue of religion and morality. Here is the Christian argument:

If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified
But morality can be justified
Therefore God must exist

Nietzsche and existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre agree to the first, or “major” premise but supply a different second, or “minor” premise, and take the argument in a different logical direction:

If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified
God does not exist
Therefore, morality cannot be justified

Both of these arguments are equally logical: the Christian performs what, in logic is called a modus tollens, which is a way of reasoning negatively backwards; the existentialist performs what, in logic, is called a modus ponens, which is a way of reasoning affirmatively forwards. Both reasoning negatively backwards and reasoning affirmatively forward are logically valid.

The existentialist understands his predicament, which is why existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre rejected Christian morality (and meaning and purpose) outright. They were wrong, but they were intellectually consistent.

The New Athiest, however, tries to deny the obvious. He questions the major premise: “If God does not exist, then morality cannot be justified.” He wants to have his philosophical cake and eat it too. But, as we have seen, he can find no competent argument to justify moral beliefs such as charity, but he holds them anyway.

He is an “Englishman.”

Dennett gets it wrong again

I think Nietzsche would make short work of this, from Daniel Dennett, in the Guardian:

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.

And why can't we translate that first sentence:

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong.

Into:

I believe that those who believe in belief are wrong?

That would better capture the internally inconsistent nature of many of the New Atheists' arguments.

Dennett here is articulating the argument (which most of the atheist existentialists, like Nietzsche, have seen through for a long time) that the denial of the existence of God has no implications for one's belief in morality. He argues that because things are not rotten in Denmark, that the values people are practicing there must not be based on the belief in the Christian God.

Well, for one thing, where did the Danish get the values they do practice in the first place? If you are operating in a historical vacuum like Dennett, you don't notice that they came from the Christian culture that informed the history of that country. Furthermore, just because things are fine now, when the Danish are living off of their Christian cultural capital, doesn't mean things won't change when that cultural capital is used up.

To say that because non-Christians practice Christian values means they're not Christian values makes no more sense than saying that Christians practicing non-Christian values (which has also been true quite frequently over history) means that non-Christian values are Christian values.

Once again a New Atheist has shown why practicing philosophy without a license can be dangerous.

The New York Times on Moral Philosophy

David Brook's column in Monday's New York Times, ambitiously titled "The End of Philosophy", exhibits the kind of assumptions about ethical philosophy that one might expect from someone who possesses a passing acquaintance with the subject, and while philosophers should appreciate any press they receive these days (philosophy does not enjoy the same level of public awareness that it has for most of its existence), Brook's assumptions about philosophy misrepresent it in ways that ought to be corrected.

In the first paragraph, Brooks attributes to Socrates the belief that the way to treat moral issues philosophically can be formulated as follows: "Think through moral problems. Find a principle. Apply it." Even the slightest survey of Plato's corpus would reveal just how alien such a formula would be to Socrates; Plato does not represent Socrates as a systematic thinker at all, and his dialectical method does not involve reasoning towards universal, objective laws. We understand Socrates properly only if we think of him as a model of how to think philosophically, not by taking his statements as propositions one places within the Platonic or Socratic system; and when one does this, one fails to live up to Socrates' standards of philosophical thinking.

If we consider for a moment Aristotle (a more systematic thinker, and probably more representative of the Greek mind), we find that he actually declares that the postulation of universal moral laws violates the basic nature of ethical inquiry. Instead, he says, one ought to talk about what occurs most of the time in ordinary situations. Decency, for Aristotle, consists in the ability to tell when a rule or standard that usually applies ought not be enforced due to unusual circumstances. Neither does one find the purpose of his ethics inflexibly rational, for the ethical life simply is the happy life--happy in the full meaning of the term.

Brooks attributes to Socrates a more modern approach to ethics, which--probably unconsciously, for the most part--sees ethical inquiry as similar to the scientific enterprise. He finds, on the basis of the data, universal laws not bound to the particularity of concrete circumstances. If Brook's directs his characterization of moral philosophy to any actually existing philosophical tradition, it would probably be deontological ethics. But even assuming he is aware of duty based ethics as formulated by Immanuel Kant and others--which is probably a stretch--nothing Brooks puts forth constitutes an argument against it.

While I am no Kantian, the idea that the discovery of natural, psychological causes and historical/genetic origins of a "moral sense" in human beings somehow threatens Kant's ethics betrays an ignorance of even its rough outlines. Kant acknowledges that most of the time people "do the right thing" as a way of pursuing personal happiness grounded in animal impulses, and the news that the genetic causes of these "animal impulses" turned out to be in-group cooperation understood within a Darwinian framework would simply support his conviction about the general human condition. However, Kant maintains that the moral law governing the will demands not only that one's acts conform to the moral law, but that one's will itself be put in submission to the moral law; and this law consists in nothing else but that the will recognize its own rational demands on itself. The moral agent ought not simply "think through moral problems", but instead acts in a way consistent with the nature of moral action itself. How this gets worked out can be complicated; in order to fully understand it, one has to read The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, The Critique of Practical Reason, and Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone.

Even if David Brooks were not familiar with Kant's ethics, familiarity with Kant's metaphysics would have revealed that no inner-worldly cause could possibly determine the nature of morality in principle: good and evil do not show up in sensuous perception, and so they must be placed in the noumenal, rather than the phenomenal, sphere. Scientific observation, Kant claimed, can deal only with what falls within the phenomenal sphere; i.e., science deals with causes which can be observed and verified, rather than the structures of the experiencing subject. While one might be able to locate the origin of moral intuition within the natural world of causes and effects, it does not follow that moral intuition is actually correct; Kant makes the case that morality can be seen as what the will necessarily postulates in order to make any sort of decision at all, and he places the will itself in the noumenal, supersensual realm.

None of this establishes whether or not Kant should be considered correct in either his metaphysical or his ethical claims; but it should be clear that nothing Brooks says amounts to an argument against deontological ethics--not even a bad argument. That our feelings about right and wrong are tied to our nature as a living organism with a history would not be denied by any serious ethical philosopher, but it does not follow in any obvious way that our feelings about right and wrong are accurate, nor does it say anything about whether our moral sense reaches out towards a transcendent moral order. These questions are simply not scientific questions; they are philosophical questions. And rather than signifying the end of philosophy, Brooks unwittingly shows why philosophy is necessary.

Why treat humans differently than animals?

Well we are having a lovely time in the comments section of another post talking about whether it is rationally consistent to be an atheist and a moral realist at the same time. I wanted to extract my own discussion with someone in the comments section and bring it back out to the main blog so we could continue discussion in without having to go back to the old post.

In this post, I want to address the question of the uniqueness of human beings when it comes to moral judgments. In other words, is man the only "moral animal." From a Christian perspective, he is, since he is created in the image of God, God being a moral being. Animals, not possessing that image, are not moral animals.

I think the point here is that unless you assent to theism, you have no justification for viewing man as qualitatively different from other animals, a view which, as I have said before, leads either to acknowledgment that men can be treated like animals, or the imperative that animals must be treated like men. The only thing that keeps us from this is the view that man is made in the image of God. If you don't believe that, then there is nothing rationally keeping you from allowing for inhuman treatment of humans and nothing rationally standing in the way of the saying that animals are morally equivalent to men--and nothing that prevents you from preferring the first view to the second.

The conversation started over at Secular Right, John Derbyshire's blog. Derbyshire was addressing the abortion question from a purely emotivist perspective and I had criticized that approach to moral questions because it disables you from making any moral judgments, since, under the theory of emotivism, all moral judgments are based on personal emotions, and one person's personal emotions can therefore have no more moral authority than anyone else's.

In short, under emotivism, there really are no moral judgments: there are only expressions of feelings.

But another commenter on the blog, Andrew Stevens, addressed the question from the perspective of "moral realism": the idea that there are objective moral criteria which one can employ in moral judgments. But Stevens is also an atheist. And so the question in the comments section of my post became whether an atheist could consistently be a moral realist.

So there we are. I addressed three questions to Andrew and he has responded. So let's get to the action (my original questions in italics, Andrew's indented)...

First, is your moral metaphysic applicable only to humans? If so, why?

This is an excellent question. No, it is not simply applicable to humans. Animals with brains have evaluative beliefs as well. Survival is good, "I ought to eat this," and so forth. Because their capacity for reason is limited (see answer to your second question), they probably have access only to very basic intuitions.

My theory is that the moral sense evolved because to be able to recognize and do what one ought to do is good for the survival of intelligent social animals (although "good for survival" is only the explanation for their existence and not their normative force). The mathematical sense evolved for similar reasons. Originally, it was just to help survival, but it is far more high-powered than that. (Biographically, it was trying to explain mathematics, not morality, which first lured me away from a materialist worldview.)

First, lurking in Andrew's first paragraph here, I think, is the assumption that any animal with the capacity to reason or engage in evaluative thinking (I think those are one and the same thing) is a creature to which a moral metaphysic is applicable, which is just to say that it is a moral creature--one that we would be obligated to treat with moral concern. In short, it would have what we would now call "rights"--and there is no reason to believe anything other than that these rights are substantively the same as those enjoyed by humans.

But I would challenge the notion that there is any animal (meaning "brute," not "rational" animal) that is rational in any sense that would justify treating it in the same way as a human being. I don't know exactly how far Andrew takes this, but I would assume he has to go some distance in this direction, otherwise I am not sure what point he is trying to establish (not that his answer is any more vague than my question, I suppose).

I also wonder what it is about "rationality" that warrants any moral respect at all. Upon what basis do we lend rationality any sort of moral worth in the first place? You could certainly image creatures who were intellectual, but not moral. I'm thinking here of the Martians in H. G. Wells War of the Worlds, or the same beings in Edgar Rice Burroughs books: they are creatures who are "rational" in the sense of having an intellect, but they are not moral creatures in the way that humans are.

And anyway, the theist is not commanded to treat rational creatures with moral respect. He is simply responding to the explicit moral command of the being who created him, who we obey because he is the primary moral authority, that we treat fellow men with moral respect. And if the question becomes why, then, anyone who is not a theist has any obligation to act accordingly, the answer would simply be that each man knows this command not only by some sort of special revelation (the Bible, for example), but that this understanding is built into every man by virtue of the fact that he was created in the image of God.

In other words, even if you don't know that men should be treated with moral respect because you have been told directly by some divine authority, you know it directly from your conscience, and indirectly, by virtue of reflection, through intuition.

Andrew then outlines a naturalistic view of how the moral sense developed: namely that it did. He admits that "'good for survival' is only the explanation for their existence and not their normative force," a point which it seems to me is telling. In what way does explaining the geneology of something lend itself to answering the question why it has moral force? It seems to me all of these types of justifications for moral judgment in an atheistic worldview fail for this reason: they are how answers to why questions.

To chronicle the mechanism of how moral judgements developed is not an answer to the question of why they have any moral force. One is addressing a question of fact, and another is addressing a question of the intellectual obligation to respect moral imperatives. They simply have nothing to do with each other. For something to have survived because it has survival value says nothing about its moral claim on us. If I simply explain by which my car was made, it tells me nothing about where I should drive it.

So I guess the next question for Andrew is, how does an atheist justify preferential moral treatment of human beings, and upon what basis does the possession of "rationality" constitute moral worth? And how does the history of moral development contribute to an answer to these questions?

John Derbyshire, Moral Philosopher

At his blog, Secular Right, John Derbyshire is currently wrestling with the abortion problem, and the abortion problem seems to be winning. In a previous attempt at moral philosophy, Derbyshire reduced morality to a "common consensus" based on emotion:

The killing of embryos and fetuses is intrinsically disturbing and disgusting to normal people, including me. As with other such acts — the eating of corpses, for example — an organized society needs some consensus, embodied in law, about what may and may not be done; though also (I’d argue) an understanding that that consensus is founded on nothing but those widespread common emotions — disturbance and disgust. I’d guess that most people in today’s U.S.A. would settle for unconditional abortion up to 12 weeks, conditional abortion up to 20, severely conditional thereafter. Whatever the consensus is, let’s settle on it and enforce the laws.

According to this view of morality there is no position from which one can criticize any action or societal condition which commands cultural consensus. Unfortunately, this leaves us a little morally defenseless against things like slavery, or racial discrimination, or oppression in any form. I suppose someone could argue that there is no consensus in these cases, since slaves themselves, or oppressed groups, do not support their oppression. But the exclusion of parties harmed by a societal condition being excluded from the consense could hardly be a rebuttal of this point for Derbyshire, since he is excluding the unborn from his consensus when it comes to abortion.

And of course under this view you couldn't argue that there was some moral imperative to change the consensus, since, according to Derbyshire, the only moral imperative comes from the consensus itself.

Derbyshire expands on his emotive theory in another post, now positing a "module":

[W]e have, as part of our mental equipment, a module that, for any other human being, computes a sort of “potential-for-accumulating-experience” quotient, and assigns the human being a value on that basis. This module likely only kicks in when confronted with an observable human being, though. Probably our brains just didn’t evolve to have valuation modules for embryos and fetuses, which we didn’t much encounter until recently. Following on from that, I’d guess that much of the salience of the abortion issue in modern life is driven by the good-quality medical imaging that’s become available in recent decades. I’d guess, in fact, that really good quality imaging of fetuses, if cheaply and widely available, would lead to public demands for earlier limits on legal abortion terms. The theocons can metaphysic all they want, but further policy/legal changes in this zone will likely be driven by things we can see and hear, and by the effects those things have on our emotions. Metaphysics butters no parsnips.

Where this "module" is in your "mental equipment" is somewhat mysterious, as is the exact evidence for the assertion in the first place, although Derbyshire seems to know an awful lot about it. The only evidence for the existence of this "module" appears to be the fact that these "emotions," which somehow, inexplicably, constitute an ought, exist.

Such is the moral philosophy you end up with when you reject metaphysics--and when you start viewing human beings as simply advanced computers complete with components and computational capabilities. One wonders why advanced computers have any rights at all, whether they can "compute" emotions or not.

What, other than the existence of a soul, makes human beings any more worthy of respect than animals--or computers?

What we can't know on Palin's daughter

Look, I'm usually a fan of Douglas Wilson. I'm a longtime Credenda Agenda reader and the whole thing. But I can't make sense of his post today on the Palin's daughter. Here is his comment:

Given everything I have ever taught about child-rearing and covenant responsibility, this has to be taken as a familial failure, and not just a detached sin on the part of Bristol Palin. The basic responsibility for this, however, lies with her father. Clearly in some way she was not getting the love, protection, and accountability that she and her boyfriend needed.

"Clearly"? How could anyone outside the family possibly know this? You would have to have morality down to an exact science to say anything like this, and the vicissitudes of the human will simply don't allow for such judgments. Doug's a smart guy, but anyone who thinks they can devise a principle that can predict human behavior this exactly in a situation that you have no access to is a little too confident in their abilities--and in the power of moral prediction.