This post serves as an index for my recent series on one of Erik Wielenberg's articles. Since I may cover more of his work in the future, this index will grow.
1. In Defence of Non-Natural Non-Theistic Moral Realism
Showing posts with label Wielenberg on Morality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wielenberg on Morality. Show all posts
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Erik Wielenberg on Morality and Meaning (Index)
This post serves as an index for my recent series on one of Erik Wielenberg's articles. Since I may cover more of his work in the future, this index will grow.
1. In Defence of Non-Natural Non-Theistic Moral Realism
Monday, May 17, 2010
Wielenberg on Moral Realism and Theism (Part 3) - Mysterious Floating Values
This post is part of my series on Erik Wielenberg's article "In Defence of Non-Natural Non-Theistic Moral Realism" (or NNMR for short). Parts one and two are available here and here.
In this article, Wielenberg contends that moral facts exist; that they supervene on natural facts but are not reducible to natural facts; and that at least some of them are brute, which means that they do not require any explanation or ontological grounding. He then defends these contentions from theistic criticisms.
In this post I cover Wielenberg's responses to the criticisms of J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig.
1. Mysterious Floating Values
Craig and Moreland's tactic is to find novel ways of describing the jaw-dropping incredulity they experience when they think about Wielenberg's NNMR. Here is a representative example:
What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value justice just exists?...It is clear what is meant when it is said that a person is just; but it is bewildering when it is said that in the absence of any people, justice itself exists...Atheistic moral realists seem to lack any adequate foundation in reality for moral values but just leave them floating in an unintelligible way. (From Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, p. 492)
We can distill two objections from this passage. First, there is the idea that values only make sense if they are the properties of a person. Second, there is the idea that it makes no sense to have free-floating, ontologically untethered moral values.
Is there any force to these objections? Wielenberg's answer, unsurprisingly, is "no". In elaborating on this answer he follows his, by now familiar, tactic of showing how the theist ultimately shoots themselves in the foot: they try to deny the existence of brute ethical facts but actually need them to sustain their own moral theories.
Wielenberg makes this point by paying particularly close attention to the variety of moral realism embraced by William Lane Craig (sorry JP!).
2. Rights and Duties in Craig's World
Anyone who has listened to Craig's public debates will be familiar with his "just animals" line. He maintains that without God, humans are just accidental byproducts of evolution, just receptacles for improper animalistic instincts. And as such cannot be the bearers of moral rights and duties.
For example, he frequently claims that rape cannot be really wrong on the atheistic worldview. The best that can be said is that it is socially disadvantageous.
The standard atheistic response to this is that humans have certain capacities (e.g. to feel pain, and to reason about the world and their place within it) that are morally relevant. So rape is morally wrong because it causes harm, compromises autonomy, makes the victim feel subordinated and so on.
Craig has a well-rehearsed response to this as well. He argues that the atheist has no right to think that harm is morally wrong. The atheist is simply presupposing a morality and using this to reach desired conclusions. The presupposed morality does not rest on anything.
The theist, according to Craig, is on much firmer footing because his/her morality is grounded in the commands of a good God.
3. Craig's Moral Shopping List
In all of this, Craig is simply assuming what he needs to prove: that morality needs a foundation external to itself. Indeed, he makes this point explicitly in a passage responding to some of his critics. This passage is worth quoting in full:
Craig's penchant for pugnacious rhetoric is on full display here. But the irony is twofold. First, he himself appeals to Robert M. Adams's moral theory, which as we saw presumes the existence of brute ethical facts. Second, he acknowledges the need for somewhat arbitrary moral starting points, he just thinks God is a less arbitrary starting point.
Interestingly, one of his justifications for this latter point is that God is, by definition, a being worthy of worship. But as Wielenberg points out, such a justification can only work on the presumption that "worthiness of worship" is a brute ethical fact. Something that is not grounded in God's will.
4. Conclusion
This brings us to Wielenberg's final point. Which is that both theistic and non-theistic moral realists begin with, to co-opt Craig's phrase, inexplicable ethical shopping lists. The theistic shopping list consists of things like:
For example, he frequently claims that rape cannot be really wrong on the atheistic worldview. The best that can be said is that it is socially disadvantageous.
The standard atheistic response to this is that humans have certain capacities (e.g. to feel pain, and to reason about the world and their place within it) that are morally relevant. So rape is morally wrong because it causes harm, compromises autonomy, makes the victim feel subordinated and so on.
Craig has a well-rehearsed response to this as well. He argues that the atheist has no right to think that harm is morally wrong. The atheist is simply presupposing a morality and using this to reach desired conclusions. The presupposed morality does not rest on anything.
The theist, according to Craig, is on much firmer footing because his/her morality is grounded in the commands of a good God.
3. Craig's Moral Shopping List
In all of this, Craig is simply assuming what he needs to prove: that morality needs a foundation external to itself. Indeed, he makes this point explicitly in a passage responding to some of his critics. This passage is worth quoting in full:
My experience with [non-theistic moral] theories is that they inevitably just assume gratuitously that on a naturalistic view of man, some feature of human existence, say, pleasure, is an intrinsic good, and then proceed from there. But the advocates of such theories are typically at a loss to justify their starting point. If their approach to meta-ethical theory is to be..."serious metaphysics" rather than just "a shopping list" approach, whereby one simply helps oneself to the supervenient moral properties needed to do the job, then some sort of explanation is required for why moral properties supervene on certain natural states. (From The Craig-Flew Debate, p. 171)
Craig's penchant for pugnacious rhetoric is on full display here. But the irony is twofold. First, he himself appeals to Robert M. Adams's moral theory, which as we saw presumes the existence of brute ethical facts. Second, he acknowledges the need for somewhat arbitrary moral starting points, he just thinks God is a less arbitrary starting point.
Interestingly, one of his justifications for this latter point is that God is, by definition, a being worthy of worship. But as Wielenberg points out, such a justification can only work on the presumption that "worthiness of worship" is a brute ethical fact. Something that is not grounded in God's will.
4. Conclusion
This brings us to Wielenberg's final point. Which is that both theistic and non-theistic moral realists begin with, to co-opt Craig's phrase, inexplicable ethical shopping lists. The theistic shopping list consists of things like:
- There is a being that is worthy of worship;
- Whatever this being commands you to do, you have a moral obligation to do;
- The better the character of the commander, the more reason there is to obey his/her commands.
The non-theistic list consists of things like:
- Pain is intrinsically bad;
- Inflicting pain for fun is morally wrong;
- It is just to give people what they deserve.
Neither party can provide any deeper explanation or ontological grounding for all the items contained on these shopping lists.
And this is the whole point of Wielenberg's article: the idea of brute ethical facts is not problematic for the atheist, unless it is also problematic for the theist.
Wielenberg on Moral Realism and Theism (Part 2) - The Problem of Supervenience
This post is part of my series on Erik Wielenberg's article "In Defence of Non-Natural, Non-Theistic Moral Realism". Part one is here.
In this article Wielenberg defends his moral theory (which I abbreviate to "NNMR") from its theistic critics. We saw in part one that Wielenberg's theory appeals to the existence of brute non-natural moral facts. These are moral facts that do not need to be given any deeper explanation or ontological foundation.
This is, of course, disturbing to theists. They want moral facts to be grounded in God. In this post we will look at William Wainwright's attempt to show how God is needed for morality.
1. Supervenience
I have covered the topic of supervenience before so forgive me if I do not explain it again. For present purposes, the important point is that Wielenberg's moral realism implies that moral properties such as "rightness" or "wrongness" supervene on non-moral properties.
Although the idea of moral supervenience has been challenged in the past, Wainwright agrees with it. He just happens to think that it makes more sense in a theistic framework than it does in a naturalistic framework.
Why does he think this? Well, as mentioned previously, Wielenberg's thesis maintains that moral supervenience is simply a brute fact. Something that needs no deeper explanation or ontological foundation. This means that asking a question like "why is pain intrinsically bad?" is misguided.
Wainwright thinks this is weird. While we might be able to accept the existence of trivial brute facts such as "A is A" or "1+1=2", we cannot be satisfied with the existence of non-trivial brute facts such as moral facts. These need a deeper explanatory/ontological grounding.
2. But isn't God a Brute Fact?
Is Wainwright justified in thinking that brute moral facts are strange? Wielenberg thinks not since theists are themselves guilty of accepting one massively non-trivial brute fact, namely: God. Wainwright will need to show why we can accept God as a brute fact while not doing the same for moral facts.
Fortunately, this is a challenge that Wainwright is not willing to shirk. He offers two reasons for accepting the brute fact of God's existence, but not of moral facts.
First up, God is essentially causeless whereas moral facts are caused. The idea that God is essentially causeless seems acceptable, but is there any reason to think that moral facts are caused to be? Wainwright thinks there is because according to divine command theories (DCTs) at least some moral facts are caused to exist by the will of God.
The problem with this line of argument is that it assumes what it wants to prove, i.e. that God is necessary for morality. Wainwright has not done anything to show that a DCT provides a coherent foundation for morality. He seems to think that because DCTs are conceivable, they must also be metaphysically possible. This is an unattractive thesis since it is also conceivable that God does not exist. But despite this conceivability, theists usually contend that God must exist in every metaphysically possible world.
The second reason for embracing the brute fact of God's existence, but not of morality, is to appeal to God's self-explanatory nature. The idea is not obviously incoherent but it is pretty mysterious nonetheless.
Indeed, Wielenberg argues that the appeal to a self-explantory nature is simply an appeal to a new type of brute fact. If we can accept that, why not accept brute moral facts?
In the end then Wainwright gives us no good reasons to reject the idea of brute moral facts.
3. The Allure of Robert M. Adams
Despite this failure, are there any other reasons we might have for preferring to ground morality in God? Wainwright suggests that there is: if theism can actually explain why the moral supervenes on the non-moral, then that is a reason, all things being equal, to prefer it to NNMR.
Of course, this raises the obvious question: can theism really explain moral supervenience? At this point, Wainwright, like many of his theistic colleagues, appeals to the work of Robert M. Adams. It seems to be a generally agreed that Adams has provided the most sophisticated and coherent account of why God is good.
The account runs something like the following. God's nature is to be loving, just, merciful and so on. Other things are good to the extent that they share in or resemble this divine nature. And because God's nature is also necessary, the supervenience of the moral is a necessary fact of existence.
What are we to make of this? Wielenberg suggests that Adams's theory only works to the extent that it presumes the existence of brute ethical facts.
To see this, we begin by noting that Adams's "God = Good" identity-claim is inspired by the "Water = H20" identity-claim. What is interesting about both of these identity-claims is that they are not semantic, they are ontological. They propose an ontological equivalence between two independently defined entities.
So "water" is not semantically equivalent to "H20" and neither is "good" semantically equivalent to "God". Deeper claims are being made about the ontological nature of the Good and of water. These deeper claims are not explanatory in nature.
Think about it this way: H20 does not explain the existence of water, so neither does God explain or account for the existence of the Good. Both sides of these identity relations have to have a plausible antecedent metaphysical independence in order for the identity-claim to work.
So when Adams claims that God is Good he is, in effect, saying that there exists a brute ethical fact (Goodness) that happens to be embodied in God. This ethical fact is not created by God, it is just ontologically equivalent to God.
Once again, we have no reason to reject the existence of brute ethical facts. Indeed, we must accept them before we can accept Adams's theory.
4. Conclusion
To sum up, we began with Wielenberg's NNMR-thesis. This thesis implies the existence of brute ethical facts that supervene on non-moral facts. These facts do not depend on the existence of God.
This thesis was challenged by Wainwright on two main fronts. First, by arguing that we should not accept the existence of such non-trivial brute facts. And second, by arguing that God could explain moral supervenience.
Wielenberg responded to both arguments by pointing out how they themselves presupposed or shared the assumptions about brute facts that are built into his thesis.
In the next post we will cover Wielenberg's responses to William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland's criticisms of NNMR.
In this article Wielenberg defends his moral theory (which I abbreviate to "NNMR") from its theistic critics. We saw in part one that Wielenberg's theory appeals to the existence of brute non-natural moral facts. These are moral facts that do not need to be given any deeper explanation or ontological foundation.
This is, of course, disturbing to theists. They want moral facts to be grounded in God. In this post we will look at William Wainwright's attempt to show how God is needed for morality.
1. Supervenience
I have covered the topic of supervenience before so forgive me if I do not explain it again. For present purposes, the important point is that Wielenberg's moral realism implies that moral properties such as "rightness" or "wrongness" supervene on non-moral properties.
Although the idea of moral supervenience has been challenged in the past, Wainwright agrees with it. He just happens to think that it makes more sense in a theistic framework than it does in a naturalistic framework.
Why does he think this? Well, as mentioned previously, Wielenberg's thesis maintains that moral supervenience is simply a brute fact. Something that needs no deeper explanation or ontological foundation. This means that asking a question like "why is pain intrinsically bad?" is misguided.
Wainwright thinks this is weird. While we might be able to accept the existence of trivial brute facts such as "A is A" or "1+1=2", we cannot be satisfied with the existence of non-trivial brute facts such as moral facts. These need a deeper explanatory/ontological grounding.
2. But isn't God a Brute Fact?
Is Wainwright justified in thinking that brute moral facts are strange? Wielenberg thinks not since theists are themselves guilty of accepting one massively non-trivial brute fact, namely: God. Wainwright will need to show why we can accept God as a brute fact while not doing the same for moral facts.
Fortunately, this is a challenge that Wainwright is not willing to shirk. He offers two reasons for accepting the brute fact of God's existence, but not of moral facts.
First up, God is essentially causeless whereas moral facts are caused. The idea that God is essentially causeless seems acceptable, but is there any reason to think that moral facts are caused to be? Wainwright thinks there is because according to divine command theories (DCTs) at least some moral facts are caused to exist by the will of God.
The problem with this line of argument is that it assumes what it wants to prove, i.e. that God is necessary for morality. Wainwright has not done anything to show that a DCT provides a coherent foundation for morality. He seems to think that because DCTs are conceivable, they must also be metaphysically possible. This is an unattractive thesis since it is also conceivable that God does not exist. But despite this conceivability, theists usually contend that God must exist in every metaphysically possible world.
The second reason for embracing the brute fact of God's existence, but not of morality, is to appeal to God's self-explanatory nature. The idea is not obviously incoherent but it is pretty mysterious nonetheless.
Indeed, Wielenberg argues that the appeal to a self-explantory nature is simply an appeal to a new type of brute fact. If we can accept that, why not accept brute moral facts?
In the end then Wainwright gives us no good reasons to reject the idea of brute moral facts.
3. The Allure of Robert M. Adams
Despite this failure, are there any other reasons we might have for preferring to ground morality in God? Wainwright suggests that there is: if theism can actually explain why the moral supervenes on the non-moral, then that is a reason, all things being equal, to prefer it to NNMR.
Of course, this raises the obvious question: can theism really explain moral supervenience? At this point, Wainwright, like many of his theistic colleagues, appeals to the work of Robert M. Adams. It seems to be a generally agreed that Adams has provided the most sophisticated and coherent account of why God is good.
The account runs something like the following. God's nature is to be loving, just, merciful and so on. Other things are good to the extent that they share in or resemble this divine nature. And because God's nature is also necessary, the supervenience of the moral is a necessary fact of existence.
What are we to make of this? Wielenberg suggests that Adams's theory only works to the extent that it presumes the existence of brute ethical facts.
To see this, we begin by noting that Adams's "God = Good" identity-claim is inspired by the "Water = H20" identity-claim. What is interesting about both of these identity-claims is that they are not semantic, they are ontological. They propose an ontological equivalence between two independently defined entities.
So "water" is not semantically equivalent to "H20" and neither is "good" semantically equivalent to "God". Deeper claims are being made about the ontological nature of the Good and of water. These deeper claims are not explanatory in nature.
Think about it this way: H20 does not explain the existence of water, so neither does God explain or account for the existence of the Good. Both sides of these identity relations have to have a plausible antecedent metaphysical independence in order for the identity-claim to work.
So when Adams claims that God is Good he is, in effect, saying that there exists a brute ethical fact (Goodness) that happens to be embodied in God. This ethical fact is not created by God, it is just ontologically equivalent to God.
Once again, we have no reason to reject the existence of brute ethical facts. Indeed, we must accept them before we can accept Adams's theory.
4. Conclusion
To sum up, we began with Wielenberg's NNMR-thesis. This thesis implies the existence of brute ethical facts that supervene on non-moral facts. These facts do not depend on the existence of God.
This thesis was challenged by Wainwright on two main fronts. First, by arguing that we should not accept the existence of such non-trivial brute facts. And second, by arguing that God could explain moral supervenience.
Wielenberg responded to both arguments by pointing out how they themselves presupposed or shared the assumptions about brute facts that are built into his thesis.
In the next post we will cover Wielenberg's responses to William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland's criticisms of NNMR.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Wielenberg on Moral Realism and Theism (Part 1)
Erik Wielenberg has been trying to defend a type of non-natural moral realism from the ire of theists and other debunkers. In this series I will take a look at one of his articles on this topic:
"In Defence of Non-Natural Non-Theistic Moral Realism" (2009) 26 Faith and Philosophy 23-41The article's title tells you pretty much all you need to know about its content. Wielenberg tries to defend a non-natural moral realism from theistic critics. For the sake of convenience, we will refer to this non-natural non-theistic moral realism with the initials "NNMR".
In this part, I will simply sketch the broad outline of Wielenberg's realism this sketch will be defended from the theistic critics in subsequent posts. Wielenberg's general strategy is to argue that anyone who wants to affirm moral truths must be a realist. To this end, he undermines theistic critiques by highlighting their hidden realist presumptions.
The Ontological Building-Blocks
To firmly grasp the nettle that is Wielenberg's thesis, we need to begin by reviewing some of the more obscure aspects of philosophical ontology.
The universe is made up of stuff. The goal of ontology is to figure out what kind of stuff there is. Ontologists like to devise, define and discriminate between distinct types of ontological entity, e.g. properties, particulars, universals, events and so on.
One type of ontological entity is known as a state of affairs. If you follow that link to the Stanford Encylcopedia of Philosophy you will see that this concept is, unsurprisingly, controversial. It is pretty clear from Wielenberg's article that he understands states of affairs to be abstract entities, somewhat akin to mathematical truths but not exactly.
The qualifier "not exactly" is needed because there are several important distinctions to be made between different types of states of affairs.
An example will help to illustrate these distinctions. We can begin by saying that "living under democratic government" is a state of affairs. This is a state of affairs that actually obtains (at least in my home country) and so we call it a fact.
Facts can be contingent or necessary. This is defined in terms of existence in possible worlds, not causal dependence. So mathematical facts are necessary because they are true in all possible worlds. Democratic governance is contingent because it does not exist in all possible worlds. Indeed, there are parts of this world that pay testament to this.
Furthermore, some facts depend on others for their existence. This is a reference to causal dependence. So, again, democratic governance is causally dependent on a whole set of other facts, cultural, historical, psychological, for its existence.
Facts that do not depend on others for their existence are brute facts. The most important property of brute facts is that they do not need to be explained in terms of other facts. Theists argue that God is the ultimate ontological brute fact. Non-theists are either sceptical about ultimate brute facts or are willing to embrace some ultimate brute fact that is non-personal in nature, e.g. Spinozism.
These concepts - states of affairs, contingent facts, necessary facts and brute facts - are all we need to understand Wielenberg's basic moral philosophy.
Moral Realism
Wielenberg's moral realism embraces the following propositions. First, some of the states of affairs that actually obtain in the world have moral properties. That is to say, it is meaningful to refer to them as being "good" or "bad".
Second, these moral properties are non-reducible. That is to say, it is not possible to restate them in strictly naturalistic terms: moral properties supervene on natural facts.
Third, some moral states of affairs are necessary, others are contingent. Wielenberg gives the example of the wrongness of torturing an innocent person as a necessarily true moral state of affairs. However, suppose that the means of torturing such a person was to press some button. In this case button-pressing would be a contingent moral wrong.
Fourth, at least some of these necessary moral facts are brute. To ask of such facts "where do they come from?" or "on what foundations do they rest?" is misguided. An example of a brute moral fact might be the intrinsic badness of pain.
That's it for now. In the next post we will consider the theistic critiques of this position.
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