The discussion of Divine Command Theory linked to in yesterday’s post is fascinating for me in more ways than one. I find it of interest not only in itself, as a thoughtful examination of an ancient and vexatious philosophical problem, but also on another, deeper level as well.
The parties involved in the discussion — Drs. Hodges and Vallicella, the many thinkers they cite, and the commenters who have weighed in — are reasoners par excellence, and are taking the question very seriously indeed. It is troublesome, however, that the problem has vexed the brightest minds since the fourth century B.C. without a broadly satisfying resolution, which does make one wonder if there is not a fundamental conceptual inconsistency in the underlying assumptions themselves: namely 1) that the source of moral truth is God, 2) that what God commands cannot be constrained by anything outside of Himself (i.e., prior standards of good and evil), and 3) that what God commands must be good, and ought to be obeyed.
To review the difficulty: if 2) is true, then how can we safely assume 3)? What is there to prevent God from commanding us to do evil? That it is simply in God’s nature only to command what is good? But for us to make such an assertion necessarily implies an external reference for “good” against which God’s nature can be compared. If, on the other hand, God’s nature is “good” simply by definition, this means that whatever He commands us to do we ought to do, regardless of how “evil” it might seem to us. ((Indeed, the Old Testament is replete with examples of divinely sanctioned slavery, rape, slaughter, torture, and sundry other violations of our modern-day notions of goodness, but we will set these aside for now.)) But for 2) to be false would limit God’s freedom, which is inconsistent with the essential idea of His omnivolence.
Our concerns about 3) would not arise at all were it not that we have our own intuitions regarding right and wrong. If that were not so, we should have nothing against which to measure the goodness of God’s commands, and no reason to doubt them. Were He to order us to torture our infant children, we would simply obey, confident in our moral probity. But that we can even imagine such a conflict shows that we have our own innate sense of good and evil, and that we trust it.
So where does this leave us? If we are unwilling to abandon any of these axioms, we are in a difficult spot. Despite centuries of heavy labor, philosophers and theologians have failed to put the matter to rest.
But abandon 1), and the problem immediately vanishes. Furthermore, the fact that even the faithful cherry-pick in their sacred texts for the moral examples that feel right, and follow only those — giving, thereby, evidence of an independent moral compass that trumps religious teachings — should boost our confidence that this is the correct resolution.
Our moral intuitions are not “commands”: they are skills, talents, propensities, and adaptations that operate at a level below our conscious understanding and volition. How they came to be what they are is a fascinating empirical puzzle, and it is one that, unlike the intractable philosophical conundrum of the Euthyphro dilemma, we are already beginning to solve.
And so, watching the powerful machinery of Reason applied to this task by these eminently capable thinkers, I find it tremendously provocative that the solution that seems the most obvious — that our moral imperatives simply need not be assumed to come from God in the first place — is off the table entirely. How can Bill and Jeffery and I be so differently constituted? How can we, who share so much, live in such different worlds?
11 Comments
Thanks for the kind words, Malcolm, but as a thinker, I don’t rank with Bill Vallicella, for I don’t have his powers of abstraction. I can follow him until he moves into modal logic, and then I’m utterly lost.
I can, however, see the problem posed by a voluntarist deity, and by God (so to speak), the Muslim Allah looks like the real thing, a purely willful deity!
I don’t know how to square the circle — or resolve the Euthyphro dilemma — but I’m willing to argue that a God ‘limited’ by reason and morality (whether within His own nature or wherever) is a superior deity to one limited by nothing but his inscrutable whim, which is to say, by nothing at all.
I suppose, therefore, that I’ll just have to wait until somebody smart enough to demonstrate this does, actually, demonstrate it.
Or its opposite…
Jeffery Hodges
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I think one of the greatest mysteries of moral consciousness is the felt imperative (I MUST…). But to base this on commands issuing from an external commander is silly, and in some sense incompatible with intuitions that autonomy is a prerequisite of moral agency.
Hi Jeffery,
So we use our moral intuition to insist that God must be morally constrained, but also continue to assert that the source of that very intuition is God?
Hi Bob,
But why should a moral imperative be any more mysterious than our many other nonvolitional drives and aversions? Why should we assume that it is fundamentally any different from our fear of falling, our aversion to feces and rotting corpses, or our attraction to the opposite sex?
Jeffery,
P.S. As for your cogitative prowess, I think you’re selling yourself short. Bill is a specialist, a professional philosopher. He is of course a very sharp thinker, but so are you. His areas of expertise are different from yours, that’s all.
Malcolm – Well, since I see morality as intrinsically a matter of giving and assessing reasons, and since the sense of the imperative in morals seems not to be deflated in the course of rational critique, I tend not to interpret this as just another tropism. At the very least, it involves reason superimposed on tropisms. It’s the actual substance of the felt imperative that I find mysterious. Sometimes, because of the involvment of reason in morality, I suspect that it’s simply the logical imperative at work. But then I come to my senses, and recognize the difference between logical force and moral force.
Bob,
It is exactly these “felt imperatives” that I am suggesting are wired-in features; I also think that even though we can build rational frameworks for our moral judgements, those frameworks ultimately rest either simply on the felt imperatives themselves (in other words they are “rationalizations” of our more fundamental moral intuitions), or on an arrived-at understanding of the “free-floating” rationales of the evolutionary design process that put them there in the first place.
Malcolm, you ask:
“So we use our moral intuition to insist that God must be morally constrained, but also continue to assert that the source of that very intuition is God?”
Sounds like you want me to solve the Euthyphro Dilemma. Anyway, I don’t think that we use only our moral intuition but our reason and experience.
Speaking of reason, you added a compliment, for which I thank you, of course:
“As for your cogitative prowess, I think you’re selling yourself short. Bill is a specialist, a professional philosopher. He is of course a very sharp thinker, but so are you. His areas of expertise are different from yours, that’s all.”
Nevertheless, I still think that I could labor for years at philosophy and never attain Bill’s standard. I’ve tried to learn modal logic on my own, and I find it beyond my ken when I try to go further than the basics. Same with mathematics. My limits used to bother me, but I’ve reconciled myself to them.
Jeffery Hodges
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Hi Jeffery,
I completely agree. My point in the post is that our moral decision-making is a complex sum of what is wired-in and what is learned, but that we need not look behind the scenes to “commands” from God to account for it.
So do I expect you to solve the Euthyphro dilemma? Not at all, because I think there is most likely no solution possible. I’m saying instead that we can (and should!) cut that Gordian knot by rejecting the divine-command axioms altogether.
As for modal logic: we all have different aptitudes, and choose the fields that suit us best. Many a mathematician would do very poorly indeed at, say, literary criticism.
As a Taoist I hold that what some may concider to be “god” and “satan” to actually be minor representations of human foibles…The real power is beyond both god and satan as it were- though I in fact believe neither are real on any substantive level….I hold that there is an all in one source of being that is called the Tao (for need of a word only) – and that morality is vaporous at best…To every season there is need… I feel no moral proscription that would keep me from killing anyone who I know is trying to do serious harm to me and/or mine for instance. I may even regret the killing after the fact, but the morality is mute -we do what we must when needs arise, and the good and bad of our activities will be manifest later so….
Intent is morality at work… we try to do good and build a path through life that is righteous, then we see how that road is paved with our intentions and still we may not be so happy when we get to where it leads…
Thanks for that thoughtful comment, Pat. As Kierkegaard said: “”Life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards.” Or, per Raymond Smullyan: the Tao is silent.