Elfman

I think it is fascinating that you and I would probably agree on most moral questions. We would see value in loyalty, courage, self sacrifice, we would not want the innocent punished, we would think it good to help the poor and less advantaged, we would value honesty, responsibility, love, kindness, and respect. At the same time we would not think rape, torture, murder, extreme selfishness, pride, hatred were very good things....all this agreement and yet you say that my system came from complete abitrariness, and yours is grounded in reason. If that is the case, then I do not know why we share so much in common.
I smell a problem with your argument.

Prof

It's not my argument that you smell.

The reason we agree on so much is that we live in the same time period, and likely you are a westerner like me. We've benefited from the evolution and progress of human morality. (If we were talking only a couple hundred years ago we may well be both agreeing slavery is fine and that taking our children to watch a local man hanged in the town square as entertainment for a Sunday afternoon is just swell).

It's not The Bible that is responsible; the God in that story condoned and commanded all sorts of morally heinous acts. We had to figure out by ourselves, through time, trial and error, which rules of behaviour make more sense than others. We are carried along with the tide of human moral progress. There turn out to be some rules of behaviour that have made more sense than others (e.g. not enslaving one another, respecting one another's property etc). We are the same species and of course share the same needs, so a lot of the rules for cooperation are going to converge in a similar manner.

But you can be the recipient of all these lessons learned through history, imbibe them with modern culture that brought you up, and still be mistaken, as you are, about where those moral rules come from and what actually makes sense of those moral rules.

The bible is incorrect about the nature and origin of morality as it is about the nature and origin of mankind.

I notice you didn't really address my moral argument...which is too bad.

Prof.

connick

Even considering the "complexity" of God, there are plenty of examples inside and out of the Bible where God does not display the attributes you suggest. Where was the mercy for the Jews exterminated by the Nazis? Where was the justice for the accused witches of New England? Where is the punishment for the wicked people involved in the Rwandan genocide? Where is God's love for the starving children of the world? If your only response is that God is "complex" (read: works in mysterious ways) then any God I posit will necessarily be a strawman. That is, you can simply say, "My God is more complex than you make him out to be, therefore your argument is a strawman." No matter how you define God, the closer he gets to being omnimax the more contradictory he becomes. Likewise, the closer you get to rendering God in non-contradictory terms the less powerful and loving and merciful he becomes.

I don't get why God could not or would not have made unthinking robots. Personally, I don't think that there is such a thing as free will, but that's another discussion entirely. If apologists have no reservations about claiming to know God's motives in creating free will why can't they better explain God's motives for something like natural disasters? Is it that a world without volcanoes and tsunamis isn't as meaningful or worthwhile to God? If so then God seems like a sadist to me. At any rate, you still can't escape the fact that it's all God's doing according to you. If God knowingly created humans with the potential to do evil then he is responsible for the evil done. If I give a fork to someone who I know has the potential to hurt themselves or others with it then I will certainly be held accountable. Don't think that you can drop a fork in a baby's crib and use your argument to escape blame for any resulting injuries. An important difference between God and I is that I had no opportunity to change the potential actions of people whereas God did and gave them the capacity to do evil for the sake of some "complexity".

Elfman

First, I am thinking about how to respond to your moral argument. You have written an epic that cannot be comprehended or responded to without consideration, so more will come later.

Second, That you bring up the slavery example is interesting. There were Christians like Patrick Henry who wrote that they felt the owning of slaves was the one area in his life that was out of step with his belief in Christianity. So maybe I would not have been sharing your view on that after all. Given that William Wilberforce was moved by his belief that slavery was wrong morally (a direct result of his Christianity) and he was the driving political force behind the abolishment of slavery in England, I again think that maybe your view of the Christian/biblical view is not as well informed as you might think. It is true that horrendous things have been done in the name of Christianity, but that is truly a statement more about the nature of man than about what the bible actually teaches and endorses. But we probably will disagree on that.

Third, I think that you can reason out morals because you live in the same world as I....a world God made to be as it is....a world where there is cause and effect and logic. So though you have convinced yourself that you have derived your own system of determining morality, you have done so not in a vacuum, but instead have derived it from the fingerprints of God. And, as God is consistent in nature (and complex) so our morals ought to look similar except that I come to my views from the other end (to some degree). I believe that God gives us the ability to reason and intuit good from evil (well maybe Adam gave us that), so that we do not need everything told to us. So in those cases, like rape, where the bible gives no explit instructions, we can still know right from wrong quite clearly.

So as I sort out your statement, I do not find them totally flawed because they fall into that category of trying to intuit right from wrong based on reason - which is something that I feel we both share and do. As I consider our purpose for being as to "glorify God and enjoy/take care of His creation", then obviously a view of morality that does not encompass a relational aspect towards the creator is only half the glass of water. None the less, I do not think your system without merit on the whole. It is not my contention that God must tell us right from wrong or we cannot know....did not Adam eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? You have a great moral capacity for knowing right from wrong....and even though you may derive a system to enforce or explain those views gives no more weight to them than the American Indian who also thinks it wrong to rape a friends wife. You just have undergirded your opinions with a system for determining things. The savage can reach the same conclusions with no system....because he has the imprint of God on him, even if he is not aware of it.

More later...

Elfman

Prof,
I have been thinking about your "Desire utilitarianism" moral system and I had a question.

You said:

"A good desire is one that tends to fulfill other desires; a bad one tends to thwart other desires."

Why are we saying that the fulfilling of other desires is good while thwarting other desires is bad? Is there some numerical imperative that we ought to have the most fulfilled desires?

Prof

Yes there have been Christians who were against slavery...just as there have been Christians who supported slavery. Isn't it telling, though, that it took so long, all the way to just a couple hundred years ago, for a Christian movement against slavery? Why, if Christians had a book from God telling them slavery was wrong, would Christianity have gone all those years, along with everyone else, without rising up against it and accepting slavery?

This does not make sense if the Bible clearly condemned slavery.

It is easily explained by simply looking at the Bible: It does not condemn slavery. It mentions slavery many times, but never to condemn it. In fact, it gives tips on regulating slavery. In fact, it tells you, you can beat your slave to death and, so long as the slave survives a couple days before dying, you are not morally culpable.

It is no wonder Christians exhibited no special insight into the wrong of slavery...until the march of modernity and human experience allowed some to start seeing slavery as the wrong it is.

And even when Christians finally started an abolitionist movement it was a split issue: you had Christians against Christians, one side saying the bible implies slavery is a sin, the other pointing out how the bible supports slavery.

That is NOT the fault of the Christians: it is the fault of a document that INARGUABLY is unclear on the issue. Any claim that the bible presents a firm, clear, unambiguous stance on the issue of slavery is utterly denied by the history of Christianity.


Then, do you agree that the "wrongness" of something comes from the reasons that make it wrong, and not simply from the fact X being commanded it?

Prof.

Prof

First, it isn't my system: it is one of many value theories. I like to read about moral and ethical theories and I happen to find Alonzo Fyfe's theory of Desire Utilitarianism particularly compelling (and I hope I do it justice so far as I represent it).

Anyway...

Because (following DU theory), the way to make sense of why we consider something to be "good" is to say if fulfills a desire.

You can see this by imagining there are no desires, and then trying to make sense of calling something "good."

A car has no desires. Hence trying to say gasoline is "good" to a car makes no sense. It makes sense in terms of a desire YOU might have (e.g. you have a desire to get somewhere, the car works on gas, putting the gas in the car will fulfill your desire to get where you want to go, hence gas is "good" insofar as it makes the car work to fulfill YOUR desire).

In the absence of any desire from the car, there are facts about the car: that if you put gas in the tank and turn on the car, the car's engine will ignite the gas in sequential portions, forcing the movement of pistons etc. No value judgement from the car makes sense. And more important, the car itself has NO REASON to do anything. It just "DOES" things.

So you should be able to see that value only makes sense when you have a desire. And without any desire there is NO REASON to do something. Hence desires are the necessary component for action: they provide the REASONS FOR ACTIONS. And as I said the question of what you OUGHT to do is a question about actions and the reason for actions.

Do desires, no reasons for actions, no "ought." Hence what you "ought" to do in any particular case requires an appeal to a desire, in order to make sense.

If you don't have a desire to vacation in Spain, then you have no reason to take the action of vacationing in Spain. And anyone who comes along and says you "ought" to vacation in Spain isn't going to make sense, given you have no desire to do so. They may think you ought to vacation in Spain for some reason, but this can only be made coherent so far as they appeal to a desire somewhere: for instance, show you how going to Spain, even if you don't feel like it, will actually fulfill some other important desire of yours that you aren't taking into consideration. (This IS how people reason, if you notice). Or the person trying to convince you may be doing so motivated by his own desires.

Desire Utilitarianism examines the nature of "ought" statements and concludes the only way they make sense is "Ought = doing X will fulfill the desire in question." So "oughts" are FACT statements. Either "doing X" will ACTUALLY fulfill a desire or it will not.

Since "ought" only makes sense as an appeal to what will fulfill desires, it can not make sense for the opposite: that you ought to thwart desires.

And in moral theory, the question of "What is good?" entails the questions of what we "ought" to do. Hence if ought equates to fulfilling desires, then "good," being what we "ought" to do also entails fulfilling desires.

As I mentioned before, in DI, moral questions, moral "oughts" are the species of "ought" that pertain to desires themselves: answering the question of whether one OUGHT to have a particular DESIRE. And since "ought" only makes sense insofar as it appeals to the fulfilling of desires, then the moral question becomes "Which desires have the tendency to fulfill other desires, and which desires have the tendency to thwart other desires."

Those desires, such as the desire to help one another, cooperate, respect autonomy and each other's property etc, have the tendency of fulfilling other desires in general. (We help each other fulfill our desires, rather than thwart each other's desires).

Those desires like the desire to rape, lie, steal, murder etc have the tendency to thwart desires (those who are raped, murdered, stolen from etc). Hence, they are bad: immoral.

Does that help?

Is this particular moral theory perfect? Likely not. But I certainly find it goes a long way further to accounting for moral questions, and giving REASONS for each step of the way, than any theistic theory I've encountered.

Prof.

Elfman

I agree that their is some lack of clarity on the issue and others...for example polygamy was widely practiced as well as slavery throughout biblical times. And though the bible doesn't forbid either explicitly, these are really no good examples where anything positive resulted from polygamy...in fact, in almost every case, a negative result occured. As to slavery, slavery of the type experienced in America, race based mose closely paralells the slavery of the Israelites by the Egyptians. God dealt harshly with that. Most slavery in that day was more similar to indentured servitude. People would place themselves as a slave to another in order to pay off debts, have provisions made for them, etc... It was more akin to the type of bargining arrangements you would find mutually satisfying for both parties. An honest reading of Deut. and Exodus on the passages about how to treat slaves would make that quite clear. And even the passage you speak about says that if you beat a slave unto death than there is a penalty....that they do not die for a few days is to indicate that they probably do not die from that particular beating. Either way, if you read the instructions on how to charitably treat the poor, even when repayment will be forgiven (7th year rules and such) there are specific commands to do good in this regard remembering that Israel was once enslaved itself. So framing the issue as the Bible supporting slavery outright is a bit disingenuos and uncharitable a characterization.


It is a combination. Moral obligations do not seem to be between things, but between entities. Why are God's desires not important in your equation? If we thwart His desires, does that not matter?

Antiplastic

Hi, prof. We've been through this a while back, and I still can't shake the feeling that you're hopping back and forth between practical and deontological terms.

For example, here you say "the way to make sense of why we consider something to be "good" is to say if fulfills a desire", but only a few posts earlier you criticise theological metaethics on the (correct) grounds that fulfilling Yahweh's desires could not possibly be what makes something good.

And once again, you are lead straight to the conclusion that without any desire to refrain from <X example of paradigm morally bad thing>, there is "no reason" why you "ought" to refrain from <X example of paradigm morally bad thing>. And although I have demonstrated elsewhere to my satisfaction that Elfman's moral stances on no-brainers like racism, slavery, and genocide are perverse, he is absolutely right to be metaethically suspicious when you hop back and forth between practical reasons for something and moral reasons for something -- he suspects, as I do, that you are conceding that there is no reason for a person who doesn't want to behave morally to do so.


Couldn't have put it better myself.

Too quick. Hypothetical imperatives are widely known to be translatable into fact statements. I don't know anyone who has ever denied this. But you keep hopping back and forth between noncontroversial statements about hypothetical oughts to categorical oughts, and since Elfman sees it and I see it it's strange why you can't see it too.

But this is trivially false. I ought to thwart whatever desires I have a desire to thwart, tautologically. I desire to thwart christians' desires to destroy the constitution, and I desire to thwart my own desires to dive for the whiskey whenever I'm stressed out.

If you freeze this passage and watch it in slow motion, you can see where the equivocation takes place.

Pretty much any desire in practical reason pertains to other desires, since humans are constantly in a state of dynamic tension wrt their subjective desire sets. We are always revising, resolving, shuffling, accommodating, struggling to reorder our psychic priorites and to drag our behavior in line with them. Of course the question of whether I should have a drink "pertains to other desires". I try to quash it when I've got work to do, and I indulge it when I'm celebrating with friends; in either case, I'm juggling it with all my other conflicting and supporting desires. (And this is just on the conscious level! It's not like there is some finite "list of desires" a person has that they could just write down if they had a big enough spreadsheet; there's also untold subconscious desires most of us go our entire lives without even being aware of.)

But the real switch comes when you go from the noncontroversial "maximizing my own subjective desire set" to the highly controversial "maximizing anyone's desires other than my own". On your own terms, there is no reason to do so absent an antecedent desire to do so. And that is precisely the point at issue.

Well, sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. There is an important point in here that morality as a practice is concerned with the suppression and regulation of selfish desires with a view toward "other-regarding" desires. So morality certainly does involve fulfilling some others' desires. But then this:

is a total non-sequitur. Just because morality involves taking into account others' desires, it does not follow that a "tendency to thwart desires" makes something immoral; and it certainly does not follow that thwarting any desires not in one's own subjective desire set is a reason to refrain from doing so.

George S

Case I

There is no God at all and so there is no one there to have desires.

Case II

There is a God who has desires regarding human behavior.

In that case, it would be nice to know His desires. However, the neutral observer (non-Christian, non-Muslim, non-Buddhist, non-Jainist, non-theist) -- non-resistant non-believer -- takes note that there are many claims as to His desires that are all simple assertions. In fact, most seem to be guesses.

If there were convincing evidence of the accuracy of claims about gods the non-resistant non-believers would jump on the bandwagon.

Deists and pantheists make no claim about what the Creator God may want. That leaves morality just where it belongs. What should humans do in their interactions with others? That is, what desires should a person be allowed to fulfill and which desires impact others' desires in a negative way making that disallowed.

That's just it. I have had a conversation with a person claiming to be God incarnate! His message was that the only desire He had for people is to Love and care for each other. And, of course, He claimed that the Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jainists, and all others had it wrong in that they made it too complex. Simple: Love all other humans equally.