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.
Read the rest of the entry »

(3 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

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.
Read the rest of the entry »

(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...

[NOTE: In order for this blog entry to display correctly, you will need the Greek and Hebrew fonts that it uses, Greek.ttf and Hebrew.ttf. You can download them here if you do not have them. You will need to ensure that your broswer can display these.]

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
Read the rest of the entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

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.

Read the rest of the entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Recently I posted a blog entry on the difference between ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism (explaining that the former of which is not the same thing as metaphysical naturalism). I also indicated there that not everyone shares the same understanding of what “naturalism” really refers to, and I explained what I think. In brief, I think the most helpful way to distinguish between ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism is as follows: In non-naturalism, moral “goodness” is a basic quality, not constituted by anything other than itself, not defined in terms of any non-moral facts, and not caused by any descriptive state of affairs. If any of these conditions (or anything relevantly like them) are met, then the view in question is a species of ethical naturalism. Yet another way of putting this is to say that ethical non-naturalism affirms the existence of sui generis, irreducible, brute moral facts. Stated differently yet again, according to ethical naturalism, the true claim “X is morally wrong” has a truthmaking set of true statements that do not use moral terms like “wrong” or “right.”

I entertain a divine command theory of ethics, and I think that one of a couple of versions of the theory (or anything that is similar to these versions) is the most plausible version. According to those versions, either: a) God’s willing or commanding that we do or not do an action causes that action to be morally right or morally wrong, or b) The property of being morally right or morally wrong just is (i.e. is identical with) the property of being morally right or morally wrong.

Read the rest of the entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

G. E. Moore

Every now and then (and I’m assuming that this is true of most people who specialise in subject areas), I feel the urge to raise a complaint or point of clarification about a common phenomenon in a field of study (in this case, meta-ethics), and to explain why I think that something should be explained differently from the way that a lot of people explain it, or why I think that a widely held assumption or belief on the part of those who work in that field isn’t quite right. However, I’m also aware that sometimes that complaint needs some context or it won’t make a great deal of sense to a lot of people.

It’s a bit like standing in the room with a chemist who is intently focused on an experiment that he is undertaking while he also follows someone else’s notes. About two hours into the experiment he throws up his hands and says “Oh for the love of Pete, why did he have to use sodium monohydrogen phosphate? It’s obvious that he should have used sodium dihydrogen phosphate!” As an observer, you wouldn’t really know what either of those chemical compounds were, or why a chemist should use one rather than the other. In order to make the comment in a way that is helpful to the observer, the chemist would need to say “Look, this is the experiement I’m conducting. Here is what I’m trying to figure out. This is the method the other guy followed. He used sodium dihydrogen phosphate, and here is the effect of sodium monohydrogen phosphate. See how that effect isn’t going to be what the experiment requires? Now look, I’m going to use sodium dihydrogen phosphate, and look, it does just what we need.”

OK, enough with the analogy already. In some of the work I’m doing on meta-ethics, the moral argument for theism and divine command ethics, I’ve frequently encountered a characterisation of divine commands – one even accepted by some who advocate a divine command theory – which I think is unnecessary and unhelpful, but in order to say why I think it is so I need to first explain the subject matter that is the context of this characterisation. That subject matter is the concept of ethical naturalism.

Read the rest of the entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

I’m going to start by painting pictures of two viewpoints. It might not be clear at first why I’m doing it, but just stay with me, all will be explained shortly.

On the one hand imagine a group of people who are moral relativists. Moral relativism is the view that there are no transcendant moral facts, but only relative moral perspectives. Regardless of one’s view of morality, pretty much everyone believes that a plurality of moral perspectives exist. This is just to say that not everyone agrees on moral issues – hardly a controversial observation. Different individuals and different cultural groupings hold different beliefs about morality. But moral relativists go much further than this simple factual observation. Moral relativists believe that this diversity of moral beliefs is reflective of the fact that there are really no universal moral facts. People hold different perspectives on morality, and those perspectives are all equally correct.

Relativism can be subdivided into two basic kinds: Subjectivism and conventionalism. Subjectivism is an individualistic take on relativism, where every individual person determines their own morality. Not only does a person decide what they believe about morality (a phenomenon that we all observe), but a person literally determines what is morally right for them. The boundary of moral truth is the individual. What is really moral within those boundaries depends on that individual, and is not binding on anyone beyond that boundary. You might hear overtones of subjectivism from people whether they have actually decided on subjectivism or not; “Abortion: maybe not right for you, but right for me!” “Don’t impose your moral views on other people, each person has to decide what’s right for them.” “If you think that your morals are right and mine are wrong, then you’re just being narrow minded.” You get the idea.

Conventionalism is more of a “group think” approach to relativism. Here, morality is the custom, consensus, or collective opinion of a group – perhaps a cultural category, tribal group, society, or some other kind of cluster of multiple people. In conventionalist relativism moral values are determined by one’s group, and what is deemed right really is morally right for that group, even if not for others. Different cultures will therefore have different moral codes, and what makes this a relativist approach is the further claim that none of these moral codes can truly be said to be morally better than any other, since there is no morality that stands over and above all different cultures. If I were a conventionalist, while I might not personally like Sharia law, female circumcision or honour killings, I would have no way of claiming that there was anything morally wrong with it, since it is acceptable to those cultures that practice it, and morality is constructed by cultures. As soon as I make the claim that other cultures ought not do those things or that they should conform to the values cherished by my culture, I have overstepped the mark, and I am no longer acting like a relativist.

The opposite of moral relativism is moral “objectivism” or moral “absolutism.” It’s the view that there really are moral facts – claims that are absolutely true, whether we follow them or not. Moral facts, being facts and not conventions, transcend individuals and cultures, much like, say, laws of science. I think that relativism is an absurd position to take, and it is no accident that moral philosophers have no time for it. It’s no accident that, as Chris Goawns noted, moral relativism has the rather undesirable distinction among ethical viewpoints “of being attributed to others, almost always as a criticism, far more often than it is explicitly professed by anyone” (see the “Moral relativism” link above). However, this blog entry is not intended as a critique of relativism, so I will not introduce reasons why I think it is wrong. The first thing I have set out to do is to paint a brief and accurate picture of what moral relativism is.

OK, that picture is painted. As promised, here is the second picture I want to paint. Imagine a group of people who are… there’s probably a really good one-word noun for it, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but we’ll call them people-who-believe-in-human-rights (I’d use the term “humanitarians,” but that’s a little broader than just a concern for rights). According to these people, everyone, everywhere, in all nations and cultures – all people – have some basic rights. These rights are basic things in that they’re fundamental. Human rights are not the product of human laws. In fact, these people say, it’s quite possible to have a collection of laws that are fundamentally wrong because they are contrary to human rights. Perhaps those laws deny people the right to freedom of speech or religion. Those laws might deny women to show their face in public. Perhaps those laws forbid journalists to publish anything that is unsupportive of the government. According to these advocates of basic human rights, there would be something terribly morally wrong with these laws, whether the laws were passed here in New Zealand, in Australia, in Japan, in Afghanistan – anywhere in the world. Rights are things that ought to be left alone so that people can enjoy them, and to do otherwise is wrong, whoever you may be. I’m not going to paint a picture that is so detailed that it requires you to imagine each and every one of the rights that these people believe in, for now it is enough just to say that they believe that there are some human rights of an unspecified number.

OK, the pictures have been painted. Now comes the claim that I want people to accept: These two pictures exclude one another. You cannot consistently think of yourself as belonging in both of these groups of people at the same time. You might believe in human rights, or you might be a moral relativist (or perhaps neither of these things apply to you), but you cannot consistently be a moral relativist and a believer in human rights.

Read the rest of the entry »

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Otago has found that there exists a demonstrable connection between having an abortion and later suffering some sort of mental illness.

The report concluded: “This evidence raises important questions about the practice of justifying termination of pregnancy on the grounds that this procedure will reduce risks of mental health problems in women having unwanted pregnancy.

“Currently there is no evidence to support the assumptions underlying this practice, and the findings of the present study suggest that abortion may, in fact, increase mental health risks among those women who find seeking and obtaining an abortion a distressing experience.”

Read the full story here.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Over at the blog, “the Christ Seminar,” a common but plainly fallacious argument about the Bible and abortion has reared its head. At the time of writing this post, wordpress.com is having technical problems and I can’t post a comment in reply just now, so I’ll make the point here instead.

The claim made in the blog entry “The (lack of) biblical arguments again abortion” is, you guessed it, that the Bible says nothing that amounts to a condemnation of abortion – killing the unborn. In the post and the comments, the author makes two specific claims: 1) That the Bible does not directly mention killing the unborn and in doing so condemn the practice, and in reply to a commenter, the author adds, 2) While the Bible condemns homicide in general, it is silent on whether or not the unborn count as human beings, so we cannot say that they are included in the biblical prohibition on homicide.

To think that the biblical condemnation of homicide applies to those who are not yet born, the author says, is to drag in extra-biblical claims.

Firstly, I think the Bible actually does have something directly to say about the status of the unborn and the morality of killing them, but I’m actually going to address what is a fallacious argument from silence in the author’s blog and comments.The fallacious argument is that since the Bible does not expressly state that the unborn are included in the prohibition on homicide, we should conclude that they are not included in the biblical prohibition on homicide.

Here is the comment I was unable to post (but will try later, when it will hopefully be up and running again). It illustrates just how misguided the argument is:

Good point, Max

While we’re at it, let’s apply your reasoning to a similar situation: The killing of those between the ages of 8 years old and 8 1/2 years old.

The fact (or lack thereof ) that they are fully human is an extra-biblical fact. The Bible is silent about it. We cannot just beg the question and assume that the biblical prohibition on homicide applies to them without begging the question.

I was shocked to realise this given the dogmatic views of some people that such killing is “unbiblical” or “condemned by the Bible,” but like I you I follow an argument to its conclusion, like it or not. In spite of what child protection reactionists might think, The Bible says absolutely nothing specifically about it being wrong to kill homo sapiens between the ages of 8 and 8 1/2. Damn any extra-biblical claims to the contrary.

This may seem like an absurd way to interpret biblical texts. It is, of course. That’s because nobody should read the Bible while intentionally suppressing their own knowledge of the world. We know that nobody ceases to be human at eight years old, only to resume their humanity at eight and a half. Does the Bible need to say this?

The Bible “says nothing” about shooting people with automatic weapons. It does condemn murder, and we, like sensible people, are supposed to combine biblical instructions with our knowledge of the world, like so:

1. The Bible says we shouldn’t kill human beings (setting aside explicit biblical exceptions like executing murderers or defending oneself).
2. Our knowledge of the world includes the knowledge that if we shoot somebody with an automatic weapon, we will kill him.
3. Therefore, biblical instructions indicate that we should not shoot people with automatic weapons.

We would think a person to be just silly if he said that we were “begging the question” by just assuming that shooting people with automatic weapons is a species of what the Bible condemns.

Take another example: The Bible says in Luke 24:13 that some of Jesus’ friends, after Jesus had been crucified, were traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus. But does the text say that they were traveling toward the West? No. So should we reject the claim that “the Bible says they were traveling West”? Is it begging the question to say that they were traveling West? Clearly not. The Bible says they were traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and our knowledge of the world includes the knowledge that Emmaus is West of Jerusalem. It is quite proper, therefore, to say that the Bible indicates that these friends of Jesus were traveling toward the West.

Likewise, it is just silly to accuse people of begging the question when reasoning from the Bible when they say:

1. The Bible condemns killing human beings.
2. Our knowledge of the world includes the knowledge that unborn children, in any relevant sense, are human beings.
3. Therefore biblical instructions indicate that we should not kill unborn children.

If a person wishes to take issue with 2) and rebut it, that is fine. Go ahead and do that. This would change the conclusion about what biblical instructions do or do not require. But as it stands, the objection to the pro-life reading of the Bible is frankly ridiculous.

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

I just added this as my Facebook status, but it’s worth mentioning here too:  How is it that a black President can get a Nobel for no reason other than potential for future events, yet that same potential doesn’t even count when considering whether or not an unborn child should be allowed to continue LIVING?*

Whether anybody knew it or not, any potential that Obama has now, he also had before he was born. What’s ironic is that if Obama does not renounce this prize, and if he continues to hold his pro-choice stance on abortion, it suggests that he thinks potential counts for him but not for others.

* I mention the fact that Obama is black because I think that unfortunately, this was a big part of the reason for his popularity and why people pin so much hope to him for “change.”

Glenn Peoples

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...