Do babies come into this world with a natural tendency to tell right from wrong, or is their stance entirely informed by social conditioning? Or is it both?

I’ve blogged in the past on ethical intuitionism, and I had some favourable things to say about it. Properly functioning people under the right sorts of conditions, I maintain, have a (fallible) tendency to form true moral beliefs. I also blogged recently about the fact that children, in the course of healthy, normal development without extraordinary intervention, naturally form belief in God.

What about healthy babies and moral beliefs? Do they naturally form true moral beliefs, or is it all a matter of social conditioning and etiquette? Well, I’ve already answered that question by supporting ethical intuitionism. If that’s a plausible view on true moral belief formation in general, then it will be true of everyone as they develop into a competent knower. But is there any scientific evidence that very young children and babies actually do naturally form (what many of us would take to be) true moral beliefs?
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I’m a moral realist. That means that I think there really are some moral facts. It is wrong to do some things, and it is right to do some things, and this isn’t just a vent of emotion or an expression of my will, it’s really true. Stephen Law is also a moral realist, but if I’m reading him rightly in his debate with William Lane Craig on the existence of God or in his more recent discussion with me on the Unbelievable radio show where I discussed the moral argument for theism, he’d sooner give up moral realism than accept theism.

An argument I sketched in that discussion was that the best way to explain moral facts is by reference to God. Although he does currently believe in moral facts, he noted that they may not be there after all, so maybe there’s no reason to invoke God as an explanation. After all, he said, we can come up with an evolutionary explanation of why we would believe in moral facts whether they really existed or not. Law wants to be careful here. At the time I raised the concern that this may just be a case of the genetic fallacy, offering an explanation of where a belief came from as though this showed or suggested that the belief is false. But this isn’t what Law means to say, he replied. The point is not that the existence of an evolutionary account of why moral beliefs exist shows that those beliefs are false. That would indeed be the genetic fallacy at work. No, the point is that whether those beliefs are true or false, there exists the same evolutionary account for why we hold them – and that account is unaffected by their truth or falsehood. There is thus no particular reason to think that the evolutionary processes that brought them into being is likely to produce true-belief forming processes.

While this line of argument does not purport to show that the moral beliefs we hold aren’t true, it’s meant to cast doubt on the probability that the process that gave rise to these beliefs (or at least the process that gave rise to the relevant belief forming processes) is likely to result in either true beliefs or reliable belief forming faculties. It’s best to think in terms of the latter, if only because it’s downright bizarre to think that evolution forms beliefs. It plainly doesn’t, but it does form mechanisms or processes that creatures use to form beliefs.

So what should we make of this? Can we give an evolutionary account of why we would believe in moral facts, an account that is blind to the actual existence of those facts? Secondly, if we could give an account like this, would it undermine the probability that the processes that form those beliefs are reliable? I will give two answers: Yes, it is trivially true that we can give an account like this, and no, the fact that we can do so should not undermine our confidence in the belief form process that forms moral beliefs. In doing so I will be drawing on an argument by Alvin Plantinga, namely the “evolutionary argument against naturalism.” While I am inclined to think that argument is unsound, many of the insights that it draws attention to are true nonetheless.
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I was wrong about divine command ethics.

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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

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.

“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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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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In chapter eight of book two of his Two Treatise of Government, John Locke sets out that famous principle that all democratic societies now take for granted: A just society can only be governed with the consent of the people:

Men being, as has been said, by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate and subjected to the political power of another without his own consent, which is done by agreeing with other men, to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living, one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any that are not of it. This any number of men may do, because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left, as they were, in the liberty of the state of Nature. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.

For, when any number of men have, by the consent of every individual, made a community, they have thereby made that community one body, with a power to act as one body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority.

However, Locke explained, the fact that you are governed with your consent does not mean that those who govern you may do nothing without your consent. You have given them your permission to govern, and you must wear that fact:

And thus every man, by consenting with others to make one body politic under one government, puts himself under an obligation to every one of that society to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it; or else this original compact, whereby he with others incorporates into one society, would signify nothing, and be no compact if he be left free and under no other ties than he was in before in the state of Nature. For what appearance would there be of any compact? What new engagement if he were no farther tied by any decrees of the society than he himself thought fit and did actually consent to? This would be still as great a liberty as he himself had before his compact, or any one else in the state of Nature, who may submit himself and consent to any acts of it if he thinks fit.

Once you have banded together as a society and given consent to a body of people to govern you, you cannot simply withdraw that consent at whim because you do not like a decision that this body makes.

Consent, therefore, is a necessary condition of government. Let me then introduce a question: What if we, as a society, agreed together and gave consent to a governing body to rule over us with absolute power. What if we deliberately elected a tyrant, intending to grant that tyrant the very power of life and death over us, with the ability to enslave us, to take our property at whim whether we want him to or not etc? The question is similar to a microcosmic version of the same question (if only because Locke’s answer applies to both cases): What if we just agree with our friend that he has the right to torture and kill us? What if we hand him a gun and consent to him blowing our brains out – to exercising absolute power over whether we live or die? Going back to a societal model, the question is something like this: Can we legitimately enter into a voluntary dictatorship?

In a word, no. But why not? Don’t you have absolute ownership of your own life? Can’t you choose to allow another person to exercise that right for you? It’s your choice, your life, your body, right? Perhaps surprisingly for some moderns (especially Locke’s libertarian fans), Locke’s answer was a resounding “no” to these questions.

Though the legislative, whether placed in one or more, whether it be always in being or only by intervals, though it be the supreme power in every commonwealth, yet, first, it is not, nor can possibly be, absolutely arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people. For it being but the joint power of every member of the society given up to that person or assembly which is legislator, it can be no more than those persons had in a state of Nature before they entered into society, and gave it up to the community. For nobody can transfer to another more power than he has in himself, and nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over himself, or over any other, to destroy his own life, or take away the life or property of another.

Locke, Two Treatises on Government, book 2, chapter 11, paragraph 35.

You can’t give away what isn’t yours to begin with, reasons Locke, and the “absolute arbitrary power” to destroy your very life does not belong to you. Obviously the ability is yours, but here Locke means legitimate power. And why not? Locke is characteristically clear here too:

The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions; for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise Maker; all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business; they are His property, whose workmanship they are made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure. And, being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.

Locke, Two Treatises on Government, book 2, chapter 2, paragraph 6.

Glenn Peoples