This gentleman is a professor of philosophy at Boston College.
I find his argument flawed on two points, but I want to save laying out the second point -- the one I really think is decisive -- until we discuss it in the comments. I would like to talk about the first point, because it touches on an old debate we've had here many times, and it situates Joseph W. and I in strange places.
He argues that evolution cannot be the source of morality, because if it were, moral standards could change in ways that we don't intuitively want to accept. He frames this argument badly, I think, by making it sound like cultural change is an evolutionary process: his example is the current moral norm against slavery, which was not recognized in ancient times. In fact, even in modern times -- in the 1850s, say -- there were very strong advocates for slavery as a positive moral good.
(On the other hand, he treats what would more usually be called "evolution" under the heading "human nature," so what an evolutionary psychologist would say is captured -- it's just captured in a strange place. Furthermore, the point he's making about drifting moral standards holds even in cases of genuine evolutionary change in humanity, should there be any.)
So the problem is that we want to be able to say that slavery is really a moral wrong: and that it is a moral wrong now, and previously, even in the ancient world. The reason we want to be able to do that is that otherwise we can't say that society has improved by banning slavery: it has simply drifted from one norm to another. If it should drift back to slavery, there would be no moral harm to society, because there is no overarching standard against which you can test the proposition.
That lands us in odd places because Joseph W. is a strong advocate for moral progress, but not much given to belief in the supernatural. I have no problem believing in God, but have often argued against the idea that society engages in moral progress: I think that at least most of the time what we take for progress is really just change. Since on any timeline more recent societies are more like us (in terms of ideas about morality and otherwise) than more distant ones, from any perspective you will observe a change from more-distant moral ideas to closer moral ideas to your own moral ideas.
Of course that looks like an arrow of progress! But in fact, it would be true from any perspective. If in a hundred years Americans have decided to re-institute slavery for reasons of their own, they will regard us as further away, the middle-time when the pressures came up that caused the re-institution as a sort of period of progress, and their own time as having the enlightened truth. From their perspective, that is what will look like moral progress.
So one way of answering the mail on this question is to do what the professor does, and hold that it must be that God has given us laws that serve as a firm ground for moral standards. Then we can judge progress fairly, and not become confused by our perspective.
Is there another? I think so, but as I said, I'd prefer to leave it for the discussion.
I have a couple of intermediate objections to the professor's arguments.
ReplyDeleteI disagree that reason cannot be the source of morality. It seems to me that reason to a morally wrong answer is more a failure of an individual's reasoning process, mostly through truncating the chain of reason at too low a level, than it is of reason itself. The truncation is illustrated in the professor's example: [C]riminals use reasoning to plan a murder without their reason telling them that murder is wrong. The reasoning process used by our actor has been cut off before it could be run to completion.
While I do agree with his conclusion concerning utilitarianism, he bases his argument on "happiness," but his definition of happiness seems different from John Adams' definition. Moreover, his argument tacitly assumes that some men's happiness is irrelevant. Until these flaws are corrected, his utilitarian argument seems flawed.
He also doesn't draw a clear distinction between reason and the process used by utilitarianism to arrive at its conclusions, but that 's a different story.
On the larger point, it seems to me that laws of morality don't evolve at all. What evolves, and it does evolve, is our understanding of those laws. Moreover, that evolution isn't, of necessity linear or monotonically increasing.
Eric Hines
Little did I think, when a friend gave me "The Abolition of Man" to read when I was a teenager, that I would be reading the same argument everywhere I turned forty years later. As C.S. Lewis first persuaded me back then, it's very difficult to state a convincing explanation for any moral argument by reference to purely materialistic or mechanistic forces.
ReplyDeleteThis professor seems to be using the word "evolution" to mean any naturally occurring change, so I understand him to be arguing that evolution can't explain much about morality any more than changing fashions of opinion can. I agree. I use the word "evolution" to mean the effect we see when systems reproduce with changes, in such a way that those which happen to be best suited for survival survive, and those that don't, die out. I know pretty much what that means in the context of the reproduction of organisms with genes. It's less clear to me that there is an analog in cultures, but you can make a case for something of that kind. In that case, though, you're not talking about morality but about systems that are more likely to be adopted and passed on to new generations for whatever reason, including practicality, self-interest, and the accident of what appeals to people at any particular time. In order to shift from what's popular to what's right, you have to have some notion of a standard that supersedes popularity. Otherwise, you're basically in the utilitarian camp, which is where I take most people to be most of the time.
Even utilitarianism has the same paradox inherent in it, though: in order for one system to be "better" than another, you have to decide what you mean by "better." Most of us just mean "whatever strikes me as better, assuming I can get enough people to agree with me."
Mr. Hines:
ReplyDeleteI think Tex has the right of the argument, but the answer that I'm thinking of involves the application of reason. But how do you envision applying it? What gets you the firm standard that Tex seeks?
I'm not sure Tex and I are arguing importantly differently from each other.
ReplyDeleteMy view of reason is pretty much what I laid out in the discussion of my dissent from Hume some while back--that reason and moral reason are two aspects of the same gift from God, artificially broken out by us in our attempt to understand what it is that we've been given. My argument wasn't entirely clear then, and I'm no closer now.
What gets me that higher standard is the existence of moral law--what God still is attempting to impart in us--that is the higher standard. Reason leads us to that law; reason, as I argued at the time, can help us arrive at a moral solution--that already extant law and a particular implementation of it.
But our understanding can only evolve--Tex' understanding of evolution, which is why I say that evolutionary progress is not monotonically improving--and our understanding, since we are not God, yet, can only asymptotically approach the actual moral law. We'll reach perfect understanding at infinity, which is when/where we'll meet God more directly.
Eric Hines
I think the problem with reason leading to morality is that at its root, if you follow it back far enough, every logical argument begins with an unproven assumption. Different assumptions will lead to different conclusions. Now, once we make a moral assumption, we can certainly use reason to follow it where it leads and derive other moral principles from it, but it begins with a non-rational assumption.
ReplyDeleteWith Eric, I believe that morality cannot evolve, but that our understanding of moral laws can. That was well said.
...every logical argument begins with an unproven assumption. Different assumptions will lead to different conclusions. Now, once we make a moral assumption, we can certainly use reason to follow it where it leads....
ReplyDeleteBut this is one technique for working backward--if largely by trial and error initially--to a "true" moral law. If an underlying assumption leads to a wrong answer, that assumption was invalid and did not approach an actual moral law. Try another assumption.
Eric Hines
That's the point, though, Mr. Hines: what do you mean by "a wrong answer"? The logic may be quite correct:
ReplyDeleteAssumption: If A then B.
Facts: A.
Therefore: B.
That's perfectly sound logic. How do you judge whether B is moral, though? Whatever standard you're applying to the content of B to judge whether it is "wrong," it isn't logic -- according to logic, it's exactly the right answer.
If the logic is sound, it's exactly the right answer only if the assumption is valid.
ReplyDeleteThere's a broad area where the technique breaks down, certainly. But if prior experience and already developed moral understanding gives us reason to believe that B in fact is wrong, and we have reason to believe our chain of logic is sound, then the assumption can be taken to be wrong. Or, in fact, our prior developed moral understanding is wrong. The clash between B and that understanding wants investigation--first of the assumption, but true enough, we can't rule out the existing understanding.
As we gain experience and understanding, though, we can give greater weight to the understanding. 2,000 years ago an assumption that led logically to slavery need not have been questioned. Today, we know better. Now an assumption that seems like a good idea otherwise, but one of whose logical outcomes is slavery we can take to be invalid.
Eric Hines
Yeah, but you probably got "If A then B" from another logical line. The way that normally works is that you open a scope line with "A" as an assumption, and derive "B" at the end of it (from other logical sentences already in play). Thus, "If A then B" isn't merely an assumption: it was also logically derived from other facts.
ReplyDeleteIn that case, questioning your assumptions just means going back and checking the math on the derivation for "If A then B". If it's solid, then you're in the same boat again: if you still judge "B" to be wrong, you're appealing to something besides reason. That's the point the philosopher in the video is making.
Yes, I took your example allegorically, not literally. Of course the contradiction would have to be chased back through the sequence of assumptions to the point of the contradiction. If that took us all the way back, then that assumption would be the one needing correction. This is how the asymptotification of our our understanding would progress.
ReplyDeleteEric Hines
Eric, if we rely on experience to check our assumptions as you suggest, then we are really basing our morality on experience and using reason only to confirm or extend what we already believe. We must already believe something is moral before we begin using reason.
ReplyDeleteAlso, "The Abolition of Man" is a great book.
Yah, well, most of us know moral law by virtue of conscience, which St Paul mentioned was universally installed in human beings.
ReplyDeleteYMMV; some consciences have been beaten to death and some have just plain given up--but we started with 'em, anyway.
...this is one technique for working backward....
ReplyDeleteWe don't rely exclusively on the technique.
Eric Hines
OK. That brings us around to the second point, which I said I thought could be the decisive one.
ReplyDeleteThe gentleman from Boston College considers each of these factors individually. It can't be reason because X; it can't be human nature because Y.
Why, though, could it not be a combination of these factors? An excellent example is St. Thomas Aquinas' reasoning on the ethics around matrimony in the Summa Theologiae, supplement to the third part. There is certainly a lot of scripture mentioned there, but the reasoning is clearly about (a) human nature -- for example, the need for children to sustain a society, but also (b) careful application of reason, for example, to use reason to determine how to perfect the natural process so that it produces the best results. That gets us a very functional moral structure about matrimony and childrearing, including the importance of stability so that the children can be fully educated and prepared to assume their role. It also gets us a lot of moral reasoning about the way that husband and wife ought to treat each other, and think about each other.
So you check your reason against nature; but you don't just take 'anything from nature' as a given. Rather, you apply reason to it to sort out what the end of the natural process is, and how to perfect that end. (If you want moral reasoning to be rooted in a permanent moral law given by God, that's not a problem: God arranged the world, including both the order of reason and human nature.)
Now the next question is, does that solve the problem? If these are not independent standards that each fail separately, but mutually-reinforcing standards, is that enough for the rooting that we are looking for? Or is he right that we need more?
Another way of asking that: what would be an example of moral reasoning that can't be rooted this way? Can we give one?
what would be an example of moral reasoning that can't be rooted this way?
ReplyDeleteNot being able to offer an example doesn't mean one doesn't exist, just that we can't think of one. But you already know that; I guess I'm not getting your point.
Eric Hines
Maybe it's not a point, but a challenge. :) Give it a try.
ReplyDelete...you apply reason to it to sort out what the end of the natural process is,...
ReplyDeleteWell, this works well enough if you believe in God, because then nature has teleos. But in a materialist system, evolution / nature has no purpose, no final cause, to refer to.
It isn't necessary to believe in God: telos in Nature is a point that comes up in Aristotle. At least some ends arise in nature: the clearest example is the end of reproduction, which is the survival of a species (or its genetic material, depending on which version of the hypothesis you accept). Squirrels really engage in food-seeking behavior for the end of preserving their individual life.
ReplyDeleteArguably all ends are found in nature. If you were to take the materialist position you're describing, there's nowhere else to find them. Clearly any ends that a human being comes to have are then natural ends that arise from material nature.
Although, it occurs to me that at least the materialist version of this doesn't entirely solve our rooting problem. Observe:
ReplyDeleteOn the materialist reading all human ends are also natural, materialist ends. Thus, anything we decide we want to pursue is an end of exactly the same type as the natural end that we were taking to root morality. Sometimes this could be OK: if you wanted to license gay marriage, for example, this would give you grounds to do it. It's true that reproduction is the rather obvious natural end of sex; but, we can say, there's no reason to exalt that end over a human-chosen end for the process. Even if the freely-chosen end is out of order with the reproduction function of sexuality, it's OK because the two ends are of the same kind: they are both ends that have arisen from material nature. Both are exactly equal, and we are free to pursue the one or the other.
Notice, though, that an exactly similar argument licenses piracy. It's true that altruism seems to have a natural end in community, which (because of human nature, and our need to educate and care for children for a long time) is part of the natural end of reproduction. But a freely chosen end of piracy is also a naturally occuring, material end. Thus, even if it is out of order with the function of the end of reproduction -- say, the pirate wipes out the community and kills several of the children while seeking plunder to gratify his freely chosen end -- that's OK, because the two ends are of the same type. They are both natural ends that arise materially, and we are free to pursue either one.
So telos in nature is good if you are a dualist -- if there is something about the mind (or even the soul) that is different from nature. Then natural ends can serve to root morality. For a materialist, they really can't.
It isn't necessary to believe in God: telos in Nature is a point that comes up in Aristotle.
ReplyDeleteI thought Aristotle endorsed some idea of deity as a first cause, but I guess I'm wrong.
You're absolutely right that if a materialist picks natural ends as the source for morality, all ends (and therefore all acts) are natural and morally equal. That's where I was going.
Dualism could work, but while it's not necessary to be a theist/deist to be a dualist, you must posit something that is supernatural: The mind is above, and not part of, nature.
...some idea of deity...
ReplyDeleteWhat Aristotle has in that role is the Unmoved Mover. This isn't a deity in any sense we would usually recognize, although Christian Aristotelians just wrote God into the role (as had Jewish and Muslim Aristotelian thinkers before them).
The reason why the Unmoved Mover has to exist, Aristotle argues, follows from the nature of physics. As you know, when you throw a ball or a rock it eventually stops. If you drop a piece of wood into water, it stops on the surface and floats. This means that motion is the actualization of a potential, which ends when the potential is fully actualized -- the wood has achieved its natural place between water and air, or the rock has used up the potential you started when you threw it.
However, the motion of the heavens is eternal, and therefore there must be a kind of eternal potential at work. But an eternal potential could only be actualized by an eternal actuality -- a kind of thing that would continually keep things moving.
All this was undone by Newton's First Law, which argues that motion works just the other way: things in motion tend to remain in motion, and have to be made to stop, not to continue.
But as you can see, what we're talking about in Aristotle's Unmoved Mover isn't a god in the normal sense of the term. For one thing, he isn't supernatural: he's a part of nature, the thing that keeps it all moving. For another, the proof is from the physics; that's quite different from the role that this philosopher from Boston College suggests, where the proof is from morality.
It turns out that the Unmoved Mover has something like a moral role to play, but it's a moral role in just the naturalist sense we were discussing. Exactly how does the Unmoved Mover ensure eternal motion? After all, when you push something, it pushes back: how could you move something without moving or being moved yourself?
It turns out to be that he does it by being an object of love. The one thing that can really move you to action without itself moving at all is an object of love. In that sense, the argument is quite compatible with the Christian or Jewish or Islamic metaphysics.
But in a materialist system, evolution / nature has no purpose, no final cause, to refer to.
ReplyDeleteSurvival is the purpose or cause (in both senses of the latter). It's just that God adds another step: a purpose for the survival.
Eric Hines
Let's step back for a moment.
ReplyDeleteSo you check your reason against nature; but you don't just take 'anything from nature' as a given. Rather, you apply reason to it to sort out what the end of the natural process is, and how to perfect that end.
One example of a final cause in nature is that a seed grows up to be a mature plant, so growing into a mature plant is its final cause. However, that is just a snapshot, a particular moment in the lifespan of an organism. In the end, the plant dies. Is there a good reason to pick maturity, rather than decomposition, as the end or purpose?
Or, let's take Eric's proposed 'survival' as the final cause. Again, we all fail to achieve that end at some point. Why pick survival instead of death?
Is there a good reason to pick maturity, rather than decomposition, as the end or purpose?
ReplyDeleteThe reason can be intuited from the title that Aristotle gives his work on the subject, which is called 'On Generation and Corruption.' When a thing is coming to be, there is something it is not yet that it is trying to become. When it achieves that end, for a long time it is 'being at work staying itself' (as the phrase in the Greek literally translates). But after a while it can't sustain that anymore, and it begins to become something else -- it dies and corrupts, so that it is available for another form to come to be.
There is another way of thinking about the question that he gives. In the Physics, Aristotle talks about the end of rain. Why does it rain? So the grass will grow, right?
Well, yes: but only from the perspective of the grass. The rain fits into the grass' natural end, so that it is a means to that end (and indeed a necessary one). So from that perspective, the end of the rain is the grass.
But the rain has its own end too, from its own perspective (so to speak, and without imputing intelligence or will to the rain). From this perspective, the end of the rain is cooling water vapor returning to its natural place, i.e., falling down to earth, then running across the ground in rivers until it reaches the sea, where water comes to be at rest.
So from the perspective of the thing itself, maturity is the end because it's the highest point of actualization: it's the end of 'becoming' and before the process of dying and decomposition. The decomposition may be a means to the end of some future plant or animal -- but that's part of the point. It's not the thing's own end, from that perspective; in that perspective the thing is being used as a means to something else's end.
So there are two reasons in Aristotle to view maturity as the true end.
I understand the 'actualization' reason for picking maturity, but what was the other?
ReplyDeleteThat the point at which you are looking at a thing's corruption is actually a point at which you are looking at that thing as a means to something else's end. It's true that my death might feed a lion; but at this point we're now talking about the lion's end, not mine. In this frame, I'm just a means to that end.
ReplyDeleteAha. Thanks for the explanation.
ReplyDeleteTwo quick points before work:
First, I think one problem with final causes is that there's no way to verify them unless you have a constructed thing. We can discover the final cause of a tool, or a book, or a nest, but there's no way to verify the final cause for a plant or rain. There's no way to test that hypothesis, and so science gave up on final causes more than a century ago.
Second, we could take a solidly materialist view that the final cause of an organism is its parents' desire. Then we could be Confucians.
Survival is the materialist's cause, not mine.
ReplyDeleteWhat is death, and what death are we discussing when we talk of In the end, the plant dies or the human dies? The soul, in humans, is merely using the body, and it's the body that dies, eventually. Is the body, then, just the means by which the soul gains some improvement toward God? In that light, does the body have anymore of a perspective than the plant or the rain?
We also can carry the perspective to extremes: the joke: a chicken is just an egg's way to get another egg. The life/death/decomposition returns the constituent parts to the use of getting another...item. Or even a way to recycle the constituent quarks. Except that protons appear to have a half-life longer than the universe; its constituents appear not to be recycled in every case.
The soul appears not to die--even in the rare case of serious punishment, damnation is eternal, with no finite endpoint.
Eric Hines
Tom:
ReplyDeleteAs regards verification, what standard do you want to apply? You can't create a final proof that (say) squirrels eat because they have an end of 'staying at work, remaining themselves,' i.e., not dying. On the other hand, you can verify that squirrels who are kept from eating die; and you can verify that squirrels will go to great lengths to avoid this.
By the same token, you can't create a final proof of the law of gravity -- for that matter, there are multiple formulations of the law that all seem to work. Which one is 'actually' correct, if any? You can't prove it, but you can verify that each of them works.
When you say that scientists have given up on final causes, the answer has to be both that they have and that they haven't. There was a debate within science about whether final causes were necessary -- and this was chiefly driven by physics, where it was thought that efficient causes were really capable of doing all the explanatory work.
But look at Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's nothing other than a theory about final causality -- about how it is the gene's end, and not the organism's, that is really at work in biology. In fact, biology is rife with such theories.
That might suggest that final causes are emergent on higher forms of organization (such as life); or it might suggest that they're a more useful means of thinking about the world than we have sometimes assumed, even at lower levels. This is one of the metaphysical issues that I think even physics may reconsider eventually. After all, the reason to think that efficient causes could do all the work was that Newtonian physics was supposed to be so perfectly predictive. In the age of quantum mechanics, though, we find that there is an element of probabilism that cannot be done away with. If that's right, efficient causality may finally not explain everything.
Mr. Hines:
ReplyDeleteThe soul, for Aristotle, is the form of the body. Forms are themselves immaterial, and they are actualities. Thus, when a soul comes to be in a body, it orders and structures the matter in a particular way. For us, it seems to be something more material that does that -- DNA, and similar structures.
I have a theory about souls, and their relationship to the universe, but that's going too far afield.
But on what basis do we take Aristotle's view of the soul over the Christian view, and that one over any other view--including any not yet developed?
ReplyDeleteAll of this, along with your example of the theories of gravity, as another example, just strike me as stages in the evolution of our understanding of established but undiscovered fact/law.
Thus, any theory that both accurately describes and that enables us to make predictions is a good theory, until another comes along that does, in some sense, better. Ptolemy's epicycles did a fine job, until greater precision was needed for navigation solely by the stars and planets. And clocks did fine until we started space travel. Generally moving toward greater precision and better predictions. There's even developing theory that quantum physics isn't probabilistic at all; it just seems like it. Chaos theory gets at this (and predates the physics a bit) by demonstrating that, at least for some systems, given a specification of initial conditions, everything following is determined utterly--but the systems look probabilistic because of extreme sensitivity to those initial specifications.
Genetics took a great leap forward once we figured out how to combine physics with chemistry, and then with biology.
There's no reason to believe that metaphysics, or more specifically our religious tenets, are any different--and there's no reason not to believe that a true GUT will unify the physical and the metaphysical.
Unless we find out that all of our science and religion, as ordered systems, is simply a long blind alley, and something else, about the fundamental nature of enquiry, is at work.
Lacking a present alternative, an assumption of fundamental order is all we have, but....
Eric Hines
Well, actually, I think I've just given you an argument against Aristotle's version of the soul. So what's the argument in favor of the other view?
ReplyDeleteWe've got an argument here against materialism, actually: even if you want to found morality on the interaction of several of the candidates rather than a single candidate, materialism ends up working against both evolution and human nature (or natural law). That suggests we are in fact judging according to some standard that deals with immaterial things.
Is the mind enough (as distinct from the brain)? Or do you need the soul? Is there a reason to believe in the soul apart from the mind?
I think there is, in a way. But again, the point is not to tell you what I think, but to lay down challenges that strike me as worthy of attempting. This is one.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I've never argued for materialism; I have posited one small area of a materialist's argument.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, I've never said one argument (in favor of a view of the soul) was better than another. I have said that they may all be wrong in the sense of not being perfectly accurate views, but merely steps along a path that asymptotically approaches perfection; although I have suggested that materialism is an early, inferior step in the sequence.
I'm not even claiming that the sequence of steps represents a steady progress. As such, I'm not married to any particular view. All we can do is assess each step against criteria that we think appropriate--understanding that all we have with which to assess is imperfect sensory apparatus feeding imperfect wetware.
Which also suggests that your challenge and my position are orthogonal to each other.
Eric Hines
Orthagonal things cross. Which, actually, happens to be a very good symbol for the actual point of contact here. You've given a very agnostic view of science in your last comment, but you're not an agnostic, are you? So how do you justify what you believe?
ReplyDeleteOrthogonal things cross.
ReplyDeleteUnless they're skew. Which sort of conflicts with a literality to the orthogonal metaphor, but not entirely. The projection of one skew line onto another can be a point.
You've given a very agnostic view of science in your last comment, but you're not an agnostic, are you? So how do you justify what you believe?
I don't. However, I have faith in the existence of God, and like Einstein, although perhaps for different reasons, I don't think He gambles. They're His dice, after all. Thus, I think the universe is, in fact, ordered. As such, there will come a time when science and religion will achieve unification. We just don't have a very good understanding of Him or His universe, yet; although we make progress in both areas.
I told a friend with a rather fundamentalist view of God that I thought God was an elephant and all the world's religions blind men. After her initial reaction of blasphemy, she wondered at my arrogance of thinking myself the village's wise old man. Then she figured out that I'm just groping my way, the same as her and anyone else.
God speaks to us in the language we can understand. Hence the plethora of religions today. And the progressed sciences and logical systems. And earlier, the considerations of the four elements and the consideration that the gods were uncaring, and then flawed humans writ with quasi-super powers. It's been interesting to me that our thinking about the physical and about God progress in rough parallel.
agnostic view of science gets at it to a degree.
Eric Hines
Eric, I'm not suggesting that any of us here actually believe any of the propositions we're using. You put survival out there, so it was your proposition in this thread; that's all I meant.
ReplyDeleteGrim, we can go to great lengths to doubt scientific knowledge. There is always the problem of induction to fall back on, for example, and Kuhn gave us good reasons to question the reigning paradigms. But I don't think that helps the materialist's cause in building a moral system.
Now, if materialists want a moral system, they'll build one and base it on whatever they find useful. I'm not saying a materialist can't build a moral system. But so far I haven't seen anything that suggests they have a solid foundation for one; they have no source for morality. Final causes don't seem to supply one, either, to me, but you have made good points and maybe they'll make a comeback.
At this point, I'd like to see what your suggestion is. You began to set out a method that combines ends and reason:
So you check your reason against nature; but you don't just take 'anything from nature' as a given. Rather, you apply reason to it to sort out what the end of the natural process is, and how to perfect that end.
I'd like to see where you were going with that.
Tom:
ReplyDeleteThis model is called 'virtue ethics,' and there are both ancient and modern advocates. The idea of a virtue is that it is a strength (the Greek, arete, can mean strength or excellence; the Latin, virtus, is related to strength and manhood).
The idea is that you can determine whether a character trait is a virtue objectively by apply reason to nature. The canonical example is courage. You can fail to be courageous by being cowardly; you can also fail by being rash or reckless rather than properly courageous. Whether you fail the one way or the other, though, what happens is that you become less capable of achieving what a human being can achieve.
You can apply this model to political virtue as well as personal virtue. A state can fail to be just by being cruel, inflicting vicious punishments for trivial crimes. But it can also fail to be just by not punishing the those who actively exploit or harm others. In either case, the society fails to provide an environment fit for human beings: the one destroys them, and the other allows them to be destroyed.
With a little thought, you can see that it is possible to get at least most morality out of this model. There are some specifically Christian truths that come only from revelation, but most of it seems to be written in our nature -- provided that you apply reason to that nature honestly.
Mr. Hines:
ReplyDeleteMaimonides also said, "The Torah speaks in the language of men." He was a friend to science, though: he was willing to revise or set aside even fundamental beliefs if there were scientific or logical proofs against them. In that case, the Torah must be interpreted as allegorical or symbolic.
There are some fundamental beliefs, though, that cannot be set aside. Free will is one. Should science seem to contraindicate it, science must be believed to be wrong.
There are some fundamental beliefs, though, that cannot be set aside. Free will is one. Should science seem to contraindicate it, science must be believed to be wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhich is what I said at the outset. If the logic that moves us from the assumption to the conclusion is sound, and the conclusion is wrong, the assumption must at best be flawed.
A key, as has also been pointed out in this thread, is how to discriminate the wrong conclusion from the wrong premise.
As to the Torah being allegorical/symbolic/metaphorical, there are fundamentalists, and others, who object to the suggestion that the Bible, et al., are allegorical/metaphorical.
Eric Hines
D*mned touchpad.
ReplyDelete...the Bible, et al., are allegorical/metaphorical. And among those "others" are those who seem to pick and choose what passages are Literal Truth and what are metaphors. These "others" may be right, the metaphor crowd may be right, the fundamentalists may be. At this remove of some thousands of years since the first writings and with several copyings and translations intervening, it's hard to say. The meanings of our religious tracts as underlying assumptions are themselves open to interpretation--and to question.
Eric Hines
If the logic that moves us from the assumption to the conclusion is sound, and the conclusion is wrong, the assumption must at best be flawed.
ReplyDeleteBut which assumption? The one behind the scientific argument against free will, or the assumption that free will is real?
Both of them will have a substantial amount of empirical backing.
But which assumption? The one behind the scientific argument against free will, or the assumption that free will is real?
ReplyDeleteExactly. Since they're both aspects of the same thing and both languages in which God speaks to us, identifying the one that needs adjustment--since each, after all, is only our approximation of what He's saying--will be difficult.
Eric Hines
Grim: Virtue ethics is not where I thought this was going. But, this thread is getting long in the tooth, and I need to read a lot more Aristotle (and other things) to really get the connection between the ends of things and virtue, I think.
ReplyDeleteOf course. Aristotle is not widely read today, outside of brief introductory courses. If you find yourself with questions about him, please run them by me. It would be my pleasure to work through his writings with you.
ReplyDeleteThank you. We had talked about that before, and I was going to email to see if you still had time. I'm about to wrap up my current reading project and thought I might start with Aristotle in January. I'll email when I actually begin.
ReplyDelete