Public Lecture: The New Atheism, Science and Morality

As you know (and a number of you have very kindly supported me in the endeavour), shortly I’ll be flying off to Oxford for a conference at which I’ll be speaking (more on that another time). When I get back I have a couple of speaking engagements lined up in Auckland before returning home to Dunedin. Here’s one of them.

The New Atheists, that outspoken motley crew full of passion and godlessness (a description I rather suspect they’d appreciate and endorse), have little time for the view that the existence of moral truths is correctly explained with reference to God as the moral lawgiver. That view, says Sam Harris, is downright dangerous in our day and age. Instead, we should think of moral facts as being scientific facts, facts revealed to us by neuroscience as it describes the human brain and its ability to produce the experience of either happiness or suffering. With this argument in hand, many might think that the New Atheists have latched on to a way of preserving genuine moral truths in a world without God.

But have they? In this public lecture I’ll explain how Dr Harris presents his view, and I will also explain the fundamental moral issues that his account overlooks altogether. Far from being an explanation of morality that makes God redundant, what the New Atheists really have in Harris’s account is a model of morality that lacks foundations unless God is re-introduced as the lawgiver who decides which states of affairs we ought to be trying to bring about in the first place.

Date: Monday the 6th of September 2010, 7pm

Place: University of Auckland, Library Basement 15

EDIT: HERE is the Facebook page for this event.

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I’m putting together an article on this subject at the moment, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on Divine Command Ethics and the epistemological objection (that’s what I’ve decided to call the objection).

Divine command ethics is a cluster of views on ethics, and they all have in common a very close connection between the will of God and moral facts. According to some varieties, the property of moral rightness is just the same thing as the property of being willed by God or commanded by God (Robert Adams is perhaps the best known proponent of the latter view). According to other varieties, God’s willing that we do or do not do something is what causes that thing to be morally right or wrong for us to do (Philip Quinn, in my view the author of the definitive defence of divine command ethics, was perhaps the best known proponent of this view). There exist other varieties, but I take these two to be the most common.

The epistemological objection, as you might expect, has to do with our ability to gain knowledge (epistemology is the study of knowledge, what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is gained, the difference between knowledge and pseudo knowledge, how beliefs are justified and so on). In short, the objection is: If morality really came from God, then people who don’t believe in God couldn’t know right from wrong. But surely they do know right from wrong! So morality can’t really come from God.
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J. L. Mackie was famous for defending two claims. Firstly, God doesn’t exist (a claim defended in his book, The Miracle of Theism). Secondly, there are no moral facts (a position called moral nihilism or an error theory of morality, defended in his book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong). According to Christian thinkers over the centuries, these two claims have been thought of as closely related, and the second claim is really a consequence of the first. If God does not exist, then moral facts do not exist either. Interestingly enough, this was Mackie’s position as well.
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This blog entry was prompted by a recent Facebook conversation. A friend of mine was remarking that she had just watched the movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which is set amidst Hitler’s notorious “final solution” in Nazi Germany. Understandably, she found the movie upsetting, and she wondered (out loud) how people could bring themselves to treat each other so cruelly.

Facebook being what it is, a diversity of responses was on offer, but one that appeared fairly early one came from a young woman at university. The problem, she told all readers, is that people stereotype and discriminate, and in order to be more enlightened, accepting and more humane was to become more educated (like her, I can only assume). I replied by suggesting that actually education doesn’t turn wicked people into good people. It only enables people to be more cunning in their wickedness. A young student (or graduate, I’m not sure) promptly took me to task for suggesting that made people evil, and then proceeded to begin cobbling together a lecture on the psychological factors that make people like that. Now of course, I never said that education makes people evil. I said that education makes wicked people more cunning in their evil.
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My paper “A New Euthyphro” has been published by the journal Think: Philosophy for Everyone (a journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy) volume 9, issue 25. Think is an enjoyable  journal featuring presentations of complex philosophical issues in a stripped-down digestable way for a wider audience than just those with graduate degrees in philosophy. In fact I think that presenting issues in this way is precisely the philosopher’s role, to serve the wider human community and not just the academic elite.

In this paper I present a modern version of the classic dialogue Euthyphro by Plato, a dialogue that was once thought (and still is by some outside the field of philosophy of religion) to have demolished the idea that morality is determined by the will or commands of God. In this version, however, Euthyphro is given a fighting chance by being allowed to share the insights of modern philosophy of religion and meta-ethics as it has dismantled Plato’s critique.

The paper was actually accepted for publication in this journal in 2007, but after quite some months the editor’s computer crashed, and the article, along with my contact details, were lost. A couple of years later when nothing seemed to be happening I got back in touch, found out what had happened, and the wheels started moving again, and now at last it has rolled off the press.

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Episode 35 is an analysis of a recent talk given by Sam Harris on science and human values. The talk was part of a TED conference, and you can see part 1 here. Harris thinks that he has argued that moral facts are actually scientific facts. I think he has failed, and here I offer an explanation of how I think he has failed. In brief, I think his entire presentation is an exercise in circular reasoning.

Harris has a new book on the subject, The Moral Landscape, which is to be released later this year. If you’d like to order a copy, please use this link and the Book Depository will look kindly on me.

 Episode 035: Sam Harris, Science and Morality [46:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Imagine if you will a painting hanging in a large and popular art gallery. Before considering the painting as an artwork, think of its underlying structure as a physical object. The type of basic physical object we start with determines the type of artwork that this will be. It could be a lump of clay for some pottery, or a slab of granite for a colossal statue. But this is going to be a painting. Start with a wooden box frame and a canvas stretched tightly over it and tacked in place. Now we have a base from which to begin. Without this, we could not proceed. In fact, instead of making this frame (or anything else), not proceeding at all is one of our options here too. Remember that saying you might have heard in maths at primary school (elementary school if you’re in the USA), “the empty set is a subset of every set”. In the set of our options here is the null option, the choice to  do absolutely nothing, to not make a work of art in the first place. But we did, so let’s move on.

Next, we obviously need a picture. This one is an oil painting. The painter with his paints, brushes and other tools decides what the picture will look like.

Then we have the critics – the visitors to the gallery who stand around and look at the paintings. This one is a very large painting, almost from floor to ceiling and five feet wide, so the visitors stand around the painting in a group, squinting at the many details, analysing it and commenting on its colour and depth, disagreeing about what they can see in the scene before them. Is that a llama or a chicken in the distance?

This is my analogy for the shades of different disciplines within that branch of philosophy called ethics. There are different “levels” on which we can think about ethics.
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It seems that some online unbelievers have trouble staying up to date with the fields in which they take themselves to be experts. Take Keith Augustine over at the Internet Infidels for example. He believes that he has the divine command theory of ethics (DCT) all sewn up.

For some reason, divine command ethics is a real stumbling block for its detractors. Mr Augustine, for example, trips up right at the outset when he is merely trying to tell his readers what the theory is. “On DCT the only thing that makes an act morally wrong is that God prohibits doing it, and all that it means to say that torture is wrong is that God prohibits torture.” In fact, one of the very first thing that one learns when becoming acquainted with a divine command theory of ethics is that it is not the view that “X is wrong” has the same meaning (i.e. is semantically equivalent to) “God prohibits X.” To boldly describe a theory like this while telling everyone how silly it is would be a bit like a young earth creationist saying something like “evolution is the theory that humans descended from chimps.” You would immediately be laughed out of town, with the expectation that you will never return.
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The so-called pericope adulterae of John 7:53-8:11 has frequently been used to suggest that Jesus did not approve either of the application of the Mosaic Law or of the death penalty (or both). Christopher Marshall for example claims that “there is only one passage in the New Testament that refers directly to the legitimacy of the death penalty (John 7:53-8:11).”¹ Marshall concludes that what we have in this crucial passage is an example of “restorative justice overthrowing retributive justice in the Christian age.”² Thus, here Jesus overthrows the justice of the Old Testament in favour of a more gracious approach to social ethics. Arguing from a clearly different theological/ethical framework, Kaiser too appeals to this passage, viewing it as important evidence that “the morality of the law abides while the sanctions may change.”³
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Since I entertain a divine command theory of ethics (although I admit to being somewhat open minded about exactly what type is the correct one), I find myself sensitive to when that theory is dismissed in ways that seem to me to be unfair. In reading Nicholas Woltersorff’s recent masterful work Justice: Rights and Wrongs all was going well – with the usual level of disagreement a philosophy graduate expects when reading a philosopher writing on contentious issues – well, that is, until I got to the section on divine command ethics.

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