A short, sweet lesson: Being a morally good person involves doing your moral duty. If you don’t at least accept that, then I think you’re basically mistaken about morality in theory (I say “in theory” because I’m comforted by the fact that you probably live as though I’m right).

But how does being morally good involve doing your moral duty? Here’s is where Kant has something important to tell you. Being a moral person is not just acting in accordance with your moral duty. You might live your whole life in accordance with your moral duty and yet in some really important sense still not be a morally good person. How so? Here;s how: It could be a very unlikely coincidence that your life is lived in accordance with your moral duty. Or maybe you are doing what you do because you’re getting paid to do it, and you don’t really reflect on what your moral duty is. Or maybe you, perversely, think that what you’re doing is really contrary to your moral duty and yet you desire to do it anyway. Or maybe you have some other motivation – you might not take advantage of a woman because you fear that it will harm your reputation with women, for example.

This is what Kant tells us, and he is right: Doing the morally right thing  is where you act, not just in accordance with your moral duty, but you also act out of duty. Nobody is worthy of moral esteem for doing a thing that, as it turns out, is in fact morally right. You are only worthy of moral esteem for doing the right thing, whatever that might turn out to be.

And that is the gift that Kant has given you today!

Glenn Peoples

In Episode 41, I address a common objection to divine command ethics: Does the fact that non-believers can still know moral truths and live moral lives somehow show that morality is not in any way grounded in God’s will or commands? Here I survey some crude versions of this argument and then offer some comments on a more recent presentation of the objection by Wes Morriston.

Episode 041: The Epistemological Objection to Divine Command Ethics [ 40:41 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brain Auten of Apologetics 315. The main theme of the discussion was the relationship between God (or a lack thereof) and ethics.

Check it out over at Apologetics 315.

Today’s interview is with Dr. Glenn Peoples. Glenn is a New Zealand based Christian philosopher, podcaster, and blogger. He runs the Beretta blog and hosts the Say Hello to My Little Friend podcast. In this interview, Glenn explores moral terminology, objective morality, the difference between ontology and epistemology, the moral argument, the Craig/Harris debate, advice for apologists, and more.

We’ve reached a milestone – 40 Episodes!

Episode 40 is an explanation of Robert Adams’ argument that the social nature of moral obligation supports the claim that morality is ultimately grounded in God.

Episode 040: God and the Social nature of Morality [ 38:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On the evening of the 7th of April 2011 (the 8th of April here in New Zealand), Christian philosopher William Lane Craig debated Atheist author and speaker Sam Harris on the question Is Good from God? Brian Auten has made the mp3 audio of this debate available over at Apologetics 315.

What follows is my sketch of how the debate unfolded, along with my own analysis of the arguments used and how they contribute to an answer to the question in dispute. I emphasise that last aspect of my analysis, because It seemed to me that there was a tendency at points for comments and claims to be made which carried a certain degree of rhetorical flourish, but which, no matter how interesting they might be, drag the discussion off topic. This was the overriding impression that I got from much of what Dr Harris had to say in his rebuttal sections.

I won’t pretend that I don’t have a horse in this race. I have long believed that Harris is mistaken in his view that moral facts are simply scientific facts. His arguments in this debate, where they do address the subject of the debate, have been used before and carry all the same flaws that I have identified in the past. Conversely, I have long believed that William Lane Craig is largely correct in holding the position that he articulates in this debate (I say “largely” because I do have some foibles with one aspect of his position). Nonetheless, I self consciously try to advocate the positions that I do for good reasons, and I like to think that I advocate my position because of those reasons, rather than vice versa, and I have tried to evaluate the arguments used in this debate on the basis of the quality of the reasons that are given to accept them. The review is not intended to be in-depth. It is my assessment of how the debate went after listening to it twice (and replaying a few parts to make sure I understood what was being said). The review follows.
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“Access to abortion services is an essential part of women’s health!”

“Abortion is healthcare, not a crime!”

“You should not use your personal values as a way of interfering with women’s healthcare services.”

I’ve heard slogans like these used more times than I care to remember. These slogans are now being trotted out by the World Health Organisation as it is World Health Day. A number of pro-abortion rights bloggers have initiated a mini blogswarm over this issue. Labelling something “healthcare” gives the impression that by opposing it, your in some way opposed to good the good health of the people who seek access to it. Calling abortion a healthcare service automatically makes those who oppose abortion into opponents of healthcare. And who wants to be in that boat? But is it actually true?

Are abortion services a matter of healthcare provision?

The first thing to say is that even if abortion provides health benefits to the women who have them, this is not a sufficient reason to provide abortion services. After all, there are people whose health might be improved if they did not have school-aged children in their care, but this is not in itself an adequate reason to provide termination services to these people so that they can choose whether or not to remain parents of school aged children. Dressing such a grizzly scenario up in the language of healthcare would only make things more sinister and dystopian.

But what’s really interesting here is that the abortion rights lobby here in new Zealand has, for many years now, been well aware that abortion services are not, as a rule, about women’s health. Of all abortions carried out in New Zealand, the number that are actually carried out because of a danger to the mother are a minuscule fraction of the total. By contrast, over 95% of all abortions are carried out on the notoriously dubious grounds that the pregnancy (not future parenthood, but the pregnancy itself) poses a serious risk to the mother’s mental health. This is the ground that has seen abortions approved because the expectant mother fears getting pimples when she is pregnant, or is worried because she does not currently have enough seatbelts in her car for another baby car seat (as much as you might like to believe otherwise, there are not fictional examples).

In fact, for a number of years the Abortion Supervisor Committee has lobbied parliament to loosen abortion law in New Zealand precisely because all these abortions are carried out on the basis of a legal criteria that the other simply does not meet. What we are told by the ASC is that since the law is simply not being followed, this proves that the needs of women have changed and so the law needs to change with them.

So wait a second. If women are having abortions, but not because of any physical or medical risk posed by the pregnancy, and not because of any mental health risk posed by the pregnancy, then on what basis can abortion be considered a healthcare service? If the New Zealand abortion lobby has continually argued that abortion should be a matter of choice regardless of healthcare concerns, then why do they keep referring to abortion as healthcare? Someone’s trying to have their cake and eat it too. If abortion is a matter of health, then let’s see the abortion lobby in the country call to see abortion restricted to cases where health is genuinely at risk – which would reduce abortion numbers to less than 5% of what they are now.

Come on ALRANZ. Let’s see if you have the integrity. You’re going to have to make up your mind: Should abortion be an issue of healthcare, and restricted accordingly, or should it be a matter of personal choice that can be morally evaluated quite apart from the tar-baby of interfering with health issues? It’s not both.

Glenn Peoples

Other blogs on this issue:

• National Public Health Week & Abortion – Matt V. at The A Word
• If Abortion is Health Care, then Health Care is Dead – The Culture Vulture
• Abortion: Not Health Care – Insights from Eire – Prolife New Zealand
• World Health Day: Abortion is Not a Health Issue – Dr. Matthew Flannagan, PhD
• Madeleine is Right, Abortion isn’t a ‘Health’ Issue, It’s a Moral Issue – Dr. Jim West, ThD
• “Abortion – Not Healthcare” – Lydie Moore, Stand Up Girl
• Abortion: It’s a Health Issue AND a Crime – Jim McVeagh, MD
• On World Health Day tell the world, “Abortion is not health care” – JillStankek.com

NOTE: In this episode I call it episode 40. It’s not. It’s episode 39.

The podcast is back. Actually, episode 39 was going to be on another topic, but then someone suggested this one to me, so as I already had a document called “episode 039″ I called this “document 040.” And then when I started recording it I thought – “Hey, this is the 40th episode. Cool!” and I made a big deal of it in the recording. And then after I uploaded it I realised that since I skipped over the episode 39 that I’m writing, this isn’t really 40 at all, it’s episode 39! So that was an epic fail.

So no sooner do I release another podcast episode, I am making excuses for it! This episode is based on a lecture on divine command ethics that I gave a few years ago. Enjoy!

Episode 039: Divine Command Ethics [ 43:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the “nuts and bolts” series, I explain and discuss some of the fundamental ideas in philosophy (and theology sometimes) that are taken for granted within the discipline, but which might not be very well known to ordinary human beings. This time the subject is ethical intuitionism (or moral intuitionism).

Firstly, and this cannot be emphasised strongly enough, moral intuitionism is not and has never been a theory about how moral facts are grounded. It is not a meta-ethical theory and it is not an ethical theory. It does not try to explain what makes anything right or wrong, nor does it try to tell us which particular actions are right and which are wrong. If you ever hear someone say “so your intuitions tell you that it’s wrong. That doesn’t make it wrong!” then you have my permission to do something unpleasant to them. Moral intuitionism is not meant to be about what makes things wrong – or right.

So if it’s not a theory of morality, what is it? Moral intuitionism is a moral epistemology. It is no more and no less than a theory about how we can come to know certain things, in this case certain moral facts. We can know them, according to this theory, by intuiting them, by experiencing the intuition that they are true.
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Justin Bieber is now a blip on the radar when it comes to the abortion issue. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone he made some fairly casual and yet politically inflammatory comments, setting himself apart from the popular liberal celebrity milieu:

“I really don’t believe in abortion,” Bieber says. “It’s like killing a baby?” How about in cases of rape? “Um. Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.”

You might think it’s stupid to care what a celebrity says about abortion. Sure, logically that’s true. Of course, it doesn’t stop the screaming hordes from lapping up Eddie Vedder’s pro-abort tirades. And that’s the point. For better or worse, fans dig what their idols say. And Justin Bieber’s fans are young teenage girls – and that’s why it matters what he says about abortion. This fact is not lost on the critics of Bieber’s comments:

What Justin Bieber must not understand is how this anti-choice statement, however nonchalant (and naive) it might have been, is going to travel at lightning speed around the Internet, and all his bazillion teen-aged girl fans are going to ponder it. I don’t have a problem with girls pondering this topic, of course. Please ponder it!

However, how do we talk to our teens about abortion after their favorite teen idol makes such a strong statement against it?

What’s interesting about this worry is that advocates of abortion rights never, as far as I know, raise the concern that pro-choice celebs like Vedder or Whoopi Goldberg might skew the view of young people grappling with the issue. I suspect that avenue of complaint is something of a one-way street.

Hat tip to Bryan Kemper for this one.

EDIT (Hat tip to Andy Moore for this update)

Apparently Rolling Stone originally toned down Bieber’s comments, weakening their pro-life stance. As Lifenews reports, the magazine has issued an updated version, claiming that certain parts of the young pop star’s sentences were removed due to an “editing error.” The version initially published suggested that Bieber thought that rape would count as a reason for abortion. But the corrected version reads: “Um. Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.” The bold section was omitted from the version first released.

Or take Bieber’s general opposition to abortion, as first quoted: ” ‘I really don’t believe in abortion,’ Bieber says. ‘It’s like killing a baby?’ ”

What Bieber actually said was much more direct: “I really don’t believe in abortion. I think it [an embryo] is a human. It’s like killing a baby.”

Accidentally edited or toned down? Beats me.

In my recent post showing how Live Action has exposed Planned Parenthood clinics abetting child prostitution, we observed people working for Live Action acting undercover. That is, they were acting as though they were people that they weren’t really. A man posed as a pimp when he wasn’t actually a pimp, and a woman posed as a prostitute when she wasn’t really a prostitute. They did this because had they announced up front that they represent Live Action and they wanted to know how staff members would respond if they were confronted with child prostitution, they would either have been told to leave, or they could rest assured that the answer given would reflect the desire to present Planned Parenthood in the best possible light, and therefore may not have been correct. Live Action therefore intentionally led Planned Parenthood staff members to believe things that were not true in order to get the truth that they would otherwise not have uncovered.

Working undercover in this way is of course nothing new. Police detectives work undercover posing as potential buyers of illegal drugs, spies work undercover in order to obtain sensitive information from enemies and so on. Less controversial still are examples like the “mystery shopper” who is paid to go into a store and pose as an everyday customer in order to assess the level of customer service, or football players who “fake” a pass, pretending that they are going to pass the ball one way when in reality they are not going to hold onto the ball and run for the other end of the field.

In spite of the relatively widely accepted practice of going undercover in all sorts of different ways, some have raised an objection to Live Actions’s conduct in doing what they have done. A spokesman for Planned Parenthood raised the objection first, attacking Live Action for “lying.” However, criticisms have also come from sources much closer to home for Live Action, the group spearheaded by pro-life spokesperson Lila Rose, who is a Catholic (this becomes relevant later when we look at her recent critics).
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