Thinking Christian

I was listening to Reasonable Doubts on the way to work this morning. Reasonable Doubts is a strictly atheistic blog with an associated weekly podcast it, and this episode was to have Tom Clark, of the Center for Naturalism, as a special guest. Tom and I have our strong disagreements, yet I would regard him as a kind of Internet friend in view of the cordial way we’ve been able to exchange opinions.

I’ve only heard about 25 minutes of the show so far (find the mp3 link for “Judgement Day” here). Tom has not appeared yet, so nothing I have to say reflects on him (not that would hesitate to respond to him if he says something that I think calls for it). The topic was determinism, which the show’s three hosts all strongly endorse. It is their joint opinion that no person has free will with respect to anything we do whatsoever; we have only the illusion of free will. We don’t choose anything we do; we only think we do.

Confusions and straw men pop up frequently in those first 25 minutes, but my favorite was this one, right at the ten-minute mark. The topic was moral responsibility: if we don’t have the slightest ability to choose what we do or don’t do, then can we be held morally responsible for anything at all? The discussion at that point went like this:

[First speaker] Steven Pinker … distinguishes between a type of justice that’s punitive in a free will system, like “That’ll teach you! I’m gonna give you five lashes for everything,” versus a justice system that simply is protective of people, like, “Yes if somebody kills somebody, let’s lock them up and remove them so they don’t do it again;” or that there’s a punishment, almost like a Skinnerian system, like, “If I kill somebody they’re going to lock me up.” But that’s distinct from saying, “You bad person! You’re to blame for that. Shame on you!” which is, from a deterministic system, meaningless.

[Second speaker] Yeah, but corrective imprisonment, corrective punishment makes perfect sense, right? If someone commits a crime, rather than being shoved into jail where they learn how to do better crime, which is usually the case, if it’s actually a correctional facility, and they help them learn different things that they can do to get money, and learn new skills, and learn “why this is wrong,” that sort of thing–if we’re actually correcting the behavior, then we’re adding these deterministic influences to them, so that when they’re released back out into the world they’ve gotten this corrective work.

It was when that second person spoke that I began to chuckle to myself, and I continued to do so through the rest of that section. What about you? Considering the context, do you find anything ironic in what he said? What do you think he said that a person like me might have found amusing?

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I’m certainly more than overdue to respond to Tom Clark here, and now finally there is opportunity to do so. It has been so long since the last post on this topic, and this answer will run so long, that I’m publishing it as a new blog post.

First, I want to state my agreement with what he wrote about non-Christians’ ability to “be moral in all the ways that Christians endorse,” though only partially. I think he and I would both agree that this applies strictly to moral norms such as found in the latter portions of the Ten Commandments and not to the earlier, where the topic has to do with relating to God. The first and greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind” (Matthew 22:37). This is not something a non-Christian can do or would choose to do, unless she were at the same time deciding to follow God’s way. Somehow, strangely, I think even Christian believers have forgotten that this is a central ethical issue, though as the first and greatest commandment it certainly must be.

Nevertheless in terms of human relationships, atheists can and generally do indeed act morally, as do Christians, so that point is not in contention here. The question is whether naturalism presents a compelling and coherent explanation for morality, and as Tom said at the end of his comment, it was his goal, he said, to show that a naturalistic ethic could be stated and held coherently.

He may have met that goal, though I have serious questions about that. There is another important goal in moral discussion, which is to state an ethic compellingly. On this he ended up where (in my experience) non-theistic ethics always seem to end up, in a place that is not at all fruitful for moral thinking. I’ll explain as I go along.

Coherence
First, my questions about the coherence of his description of morality.

Tom Clark says “values flow from human nature as modulated by human culture… we’re hard-wire to take our moral intuitions very seriously.” We agree that values may be discovered by observing human nature, and by reflecting on our own experiences; and we agree that these are things we take very seriously. To the not inconsiderable extent that this is an empirical fact, it is explained at least as well by theism as by naturalism. Christian and Judaic theism takes it that humans are created in God’s image, which includes having at least some grasp of what goodness is in God’s view.

Tom says then “there’s good empirical evidence for a robust natural motivational basis for the problem morality addresses.” If by that he means that this provides differential support for a natural motivational basis–i.e., that this is evidence for a natural more than for a supernatural basis–I would disagree, for supernaturalism accounts for the empirical evidence at least as well as naturalism does.

We come now to a further point Tom makes here, which raises several puzzling questions for someone like me.

How does a liberal-progressive Western naturalist like myself justify the proposition that all humans have equal claim to the same set of rights against the opposing conservative-regressive claim, advanced by some Eastern Muslim theocracies, that certain classes of humans (gays, women, minorities, non-Muslims) should not be granted equal rights? This is a quintessentially normative, not empirical question, but it is informed by empirical considerations. The basic argument, some of which you kindly quoted, is that all classes of human beings have, in empirical fact, more or less the same desire for self-preservation and actualization – for human flourishing – and there’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Normativity
My first question with respect to this is how it can be, when Tom has set up empiricism as the only basis and test for knowledge, that another category, the normative, can find room to enter in. He seems on the one hand to have set the two in opposition to each other, but on the other hand to have given the normative some epistemic space anyway. I’m not at all sure how this can be done, given his epistemology (discussed earlier in this series).

Equality of Desire
Second, is it empirically true that all human beings (not classes of human beings as written here, but human beings themselves) have the same desire for self-preservation and actualization? How has this been measured? Is there not psychological/sociological evidence to the contrary? What about suicidal persons? The question is important because of a follow-up point found not much later:

The claim that all humans are of equal worth flows from the fact that each of us has more or less the same desire for flourishing, and the fact that there’s no basis to suppose some classes of humans should be thwarted in that desire. The value, the worth of each human being, is rooted in human nature itself, namely in each and every person’s strong innate desire to live and thrive.

If worth is derived from desire to flourish, then if I become depressed and suicidal, does my worth decrease? I assume Tom would answer no, but on what basis? This puzzles me.

My third and fourth questions from this passage requires me to quote part of it again:

There’s no empirical basis to deny any class the opportunity for such flourishing. So, absent any countervailing considerations, they should be granted such opportunities.

Abstractness
I frankly don’t know how to apply morality to a class. This is an abstraction beyond practical application. I can treat a person morally or immorally, and I can treat members of a class morally or immorally, but I can only do so by the way I treat them as individual persons. Maybe my decisions on how to treat them are based on the class to which they belong (in reality or in my perception). But even in that case it is not the class I’m treating well or ill, it is the person. Even if another member of that class feels well-treated or put off because I made my decision on the basis of class membership, that is a person, not a class, that is being affected by my action.

This point matters in this discussion because Tom Clark seems to think equality of worth comes from each class having equal desires for life, self-actualization, and flourishing. Statistical leveling of large groups tends to make this the case, but morality is not about statistically-defined groups, but about persons. I would like to know if he can take this to the level of individuals.

What is a Class?
Further, even if treating the matter according to classes could be defended as legitimate, I wonder if there’s some smuggled-in set of assumptions about what constitutes a class. I think there may be a class of suicidal persons who do not have the same desire for flourishing as others have. Does being a member of that class make one’s worth less than others? Or, there may be a class of suicidal persons and their spouses. Why can we not define a class in that way? This class’s overall desire for self-actualization and self-preservation is, on average, less than the rest of the population. Does that mean that even the non-suicidal spouse, as a member of that class, has a lower worth than someone who is not associated with a suicidal person?

In other words, if there is a coherent basis for regarding each person as equal in Tom Clark’s ethic, I have yet to understand it.

has to do with a to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

Compellingness
I suppose I made up that word “compellingness.” It has to do with answering to the question, “why should I follow moral system M?” Without this compellingness, there is no reason to follow an ethic, and the person is free to make up his own or to follow an ethic of personal impulse and immediate unmoderated desire. Compellingness (and here for now I will switch to the more common “oughtness”) may be either internal or external. There is the inward oughtness of human nature, discussed above, and there is also that which is learned from outside oneself through family and culture, which often becomes internalized as an inward sense of oughtness.

But as Tom Clark has astutely pointed out, these norms are not all universally shared. The naturalist has two options to revert to at that point: persuasion and power. He states it clearly enough here:

Because there’s no value-neutral criterion (such as God’s authority) by which to decide between competing moral principles, arguments for them necessarily involve appeals to pre-existing values. So, progressive naturalists appeal to the innate moral sense… and they cite the virtues of existing cultural traditions and political arrangements based in progressive values…. However, given sharp differences in cultures and worldviews, there is no guarantee such arguments will cut any ice with the opposition, and sometimes we are forced to use force in defending our principles. This point gets elaborated here.

In the ellipsis I left out part of the way in which he would attempt to persuade those who disagree, but the point is that there is either persuasion or force. What bothers one like me most about this is that quite clearly, morality is a matter of who wins. I don’t see a universal law in naturalism that decrees liberal equality will be the winner. In fact, I suspect there may even be some chronological/cultural chauvinism involved in supposing that our culture, alone among all cultures and all periods of history, has figured it out in a way that will last. The door is wide open for a different winner, one that Tom Clark will argue (unless he changes his mind) fails to meet the standards of empiricism. The new winner may well say, “we see it differently,” and that will be that. The word “compellingness” comes back, with a decidedly less friendly feel to it than in the first way I employed it here; and who knows where “oughtness” goes?

Christian theism’s ethic is based on a much firmer foundation. Standards of morality are part of the furniture of reality, as it were, which is why we have a basic apprehension of them in our consciences. Their oughtness is inherent within them, and not derived from some other non-moral principle. Their compellingness is fitting to them, inherent and appropriate to their own basic nature, and our experience of their compellingness may be internalized or external. Either way, it fits.

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An open letter to Alonze Fyfe, “The Atheist Ethicist.”

CC: Any atheistic, agnostic, or skeptical reader with an interest in ethics

Greetings, Alonzo,

You have remained strangely silent on the matter of reading opposing views, after I have asked you several times (starting here; also here and here) whether that is something you have made your practice. I raised the question because you had said theistic faith was evidence-free and unreasoning, and I suggested a set of authors for you to read in rebuttal of that opinion. Because of your silence, I wonder now more strongly than ever whether you have done much serious reading in theism.

Not long ago Nick Matzke (recently of the National Center for Science Education) challenged me for not having read “the basic references on the morality/evolution/human nature topic.” Though actually I’ve read a fair amount of secular ethical theory, I had not read evolutionary-based ethical theory. I responded with a trop to the library to obtain the two books he’d recommended, via interlibrary loan. This was the outcome, so far at least.

So today I challenge you with a list of theistic reading that’s much shorter, and more to the point of your  chosen subject area: to read some of the best standard works on theistic ethics. I don’t see how you can be an “atheist ethicist” without understanding the contrasting view.

Where to begin? The standard on Christian ethics is of course the New Testament. It is the center and source of Christian belief on the topic, and it is also where we read the life of the man many through the ages lived the life that shines as the most ethical ever lived, with the greatest ethical teaching. I’m going to suggest a few pages to you to start with, actually:

• The Sermon on the Mount, Mathew chapters 5-7, and the parallel in Luke 6.
• The trial of Jesus Christ (commemmorated today, Good Friday, in the Western church), in Luke chapters 22 and 23, and John chapters 18 and 19. In both of those locations you might as well keep reading and see how it comes out, since you’re so close to the end of each of those books at that point anyway.
• The life of Christ in its shortest written expression, the book of Mark.
• And finally from the original source, the ethical teaching of Paul, in the book of Romans. Much of Romans is about how to live an ethical life, in view of the acknowledged difficulty of remaining consistent in it (see chapter 7). I can guarantee you’ll find Romans a distinct intellectual challenge, and specifically a challenge to your opinion that theists do not reason through their beliefs.
• Because of the external references and allusions in Romans, you’ll need a commentary (most people do) to guide you through. This one by F.F. Bruce, a top NT scholar, would be a great choice.

I strongly recommend a good modern translation for the Bible readings: English Standard Version (online here) or the New International Version or New King James Version (online here).

Once you get through this, I would suggest you add to it C.S. Lewis’s very short (still not asking a lot of you) but powerfully argued book The Abolition of Man, for a more contemporary treatment of ethical questions in context of atheism. His Mere Christianity, a modern classic, would also be very good.

Am I asking a lot of you? Actually, if you do not do this you are not asking enough of yourself. You really can’t write on atheistic ethics without knowing the contrasting views. I’m not asking anything of you that I haven’t done myself, anyway. I don’t read everything anyone suggests, obviously, there’s a limit; but I’ll rarely take a position of knowledge on a topic without having read the best on both sides of it. Frankly, when I’ve skipped that step, I’ve been called on it, as with Nick Matzke above. That’s to be expected, and it’s entirely fair.

The list I gave you has multiple items, but  it won’t add up to more than maybe forty to sixty (estimated) pages of reading in the Bible, plus a commentary for reference and two relatively short books. It’s hardly a beginning, really, for someone who claims some knowledge on ethics in context of the atheism/theism question. You owe it to yourself, really; without it you seriously truncate your own expertise.

I’ll look forward to hearing back from you on this. Again, if this is the kind of thing you’ve already done, I’ll be interested to hear that, too.

With warm regards,

Tom Gilson

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From the New York Times:

A new study by Christopher W. Crowe, an economist for the International Monetary Fund, found that during the last two housing booms in the United States, regions with high concentrations of evangelicals saw lower gains in home prices and less volatility than similar regions with fewer evangelical residents.

The reason to consider this more than just a statistical quirk, Mr. Crowe says, is that conservative Christianity teaches followers that God owns all worldly possessions. In practice, that means that unchecked greed and speculative frenzy are seen as undesirable in the evangelical community….

…the evangelicals’ role in the market may have prevented home prices from getting even more out of whack.

[Link: Houses of God: Did Evangelicals Curb the Housing Bubble? - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com]

I like this: “unchecked greed and speculative frenzy are seen as undesirable in the evangelical community.” First, of course that’s true. Second, we have sound biblical reasons for those values. Third, those values have apparently proved to have positive empirical results. Fourth, I hope everybody wakes up to the importance of these values.

And fifth, the Bible is a timeless book. Following biblical principles makes a big difference still in the 21st century, in many ways. This is just one more.

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After a two-month hiatus, it’s my pleasure once again to take up conversation with Tom Clark, director of the Center for Naturalism, who also runs the website Naturalism.org and the Memeing Naturalism blog. Our first three rounds on this were interesting and productive, in my opinion, and apparently also Tom’s.

Previously we discussed whether his approach to epistemology was adequate and supportable, which I do not intend to raise for discussion again here; I think we’ve covered that, even though we did not come to agreement. The great remaining question has to do with his position on the ethics of naturalism. I will illustrate his position with a series of quotes from his paper Reality and Its Rivals: Putting Epistemology First.

This statement of the obvious – that respect for empiricism matters, crucially – simply sets the stage for the central argument of this paper: that when it comes to representing reality, there is no coherent, ethically responsible substitute for science and other empirical disciplines.

But the empirical imperative is not only rational, it becomes a positive ethical obligation when we engage in collective projects that affect the lives of millions.

A little epistemic humility would go a long way toward reducing the ideological tribalism underlying the culture wars.

So we see that Clark values, and seeks to be guided by, responsibility and humility, and he acknowledges that there are ethical obligations upon humans. On these things we are quite in agreement. He shares more detailed ethical views in passages like this one:

Religiously motivated opponents of birth control, abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage have sought to disseminate information at odds with science: about the supposed inefficacy of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV, the purportedly dire psychological impact of having an abortion or growing up with two mommies or daddies, and the supposedly superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells.

(I note in passing that the “superior feasibility of some alternatives to embryonic stem cells” is, at least at this stage of research, quite empirically factual. But that is not my main point here.)

Now, all of this is in context of an impassioned call for empiricism, Clark’s position that nothing is known unless it is knowable through science or means very much like science, i.e., intersubjective empiricism. In a spirit of epistemic humility, no belief or opinion should be regarded as knowledge unless the object of that belief is a public object, capable of being examined by anyone (theoretically at least), and on which other persons generally find agreement.

Clearly, though, he takes ethical obligations to be an object of knowledge. How can he do this on his empiricist epistemology? One potential difficulty with his position comes to mind but must be discarded immediately. By public object, we can be sure Clark does not necessarily mean a physical object; I’m sure he also includes abstract objects like, say, the triangle formed by our sun, Betelgeuse, and Sirius; or numbers; or logical relations. So even though ethical obligations are not touchable, countable, or measurable, that in itself does not automatically rule them out under his epistemology, provided they can be tested by some appropriately empirical means.

Clark suggests that this is possible. He says that “empiricism and equality go hand in hand,” producing a basis for ethics that stands, by the way, in sharp contrast to religiously based ethics:

The primary justifications for discrimination against women, racial, ethnic and religious minorities, atheists, homosexuals, and other out-groups are found in traditional faith-based religions such as Christianity and Islam, and in non-empirical secular ideologies such as Nazism, social Darwinism and white supremacy. There are no good science-based reasons for such discrimination, so to the extent that we can divest people of their factually unfounded prejudices we’ll move toward a more tolerant, pluralist, egalitarian culture of universal human rights.

In an earlier paper of his he expresses this view in further detail:

By contrast, there is no science-based, empirically derived justification for supposing any class of individuals merits fewer opportunities for self-development, or for limiting their rights to education, political participation, owning property, or any other right commonly held by individuals in liberal secular societies. Such limitations and discriminations can only find justification in non-empirical beliefs about the privileges owed those ranked higher in a social hierarchy, or belonging to certain in-groups, whether based on gender, race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, religious identification, or other denomination. The history of progress in human rights (progress as progressives see it) is the dismantling of such justifications, of showing them to have no basis in empirical fact.

Whatever biological and cultural differences exist between genders, races, ethnicities, religious groups and nationalities, there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or low status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met, or not to develop their full potential by according them the same rights as others. As scientific empiricism has won allegiance as our guide to reality, displacing faith and other non-empirical grounds for belief, the discriminatory social practices built on such beliefs have been deprived of their rationales, making the presumption of equal rights more and more the norm.

In summary, then, Clark holds to an ethic including responsibility, humility, and human equality (a generally liberal approach to this, as stated elsewhere in that paper); and he considers that there are obligations attached to all of these. He maintains that there is an empirical basis to his ethic.

Two questions come to mind in response. First, is there any place where he proposes to bridge the is-ought gap? This is the famous issue posed by David Hume and described as the naturalistic fallacy: that one cannot derive an ought from an is. Christian theism has no problem with this, for the ought is as much an aspect of the character of God, and thus the foundation of reality, as any other aspect of his character. The oughts of human ethics do not start from an is, they derive from the original oughts of basic reality in God.

Second, is there really an empirical basis for any of his ethics at all? What is the empirical basis for supposing we have an ethical obligation to empiricism? Is that not somewhat circular? In his paper he poses this ethical obligation as being demonstrated in its results; that it leads to more equal treatment for humans, more respect for public health and the environment, and so on. These imply values attached to the environment and to human equality. Do these values flow from empirically-based knowledge?

To the second of those, human equality, he proposes an answer. He says there is “no empirically derived justification for supposing any class individuals merits fewer opportunities…. there are no scientific grounds for supposing members of out-groups, or law status members of in-groups, deserve not to have their human needs met.” But what is the empirical study that supports this? Is it not empirically obvious that persons are not equal? As individuals, some of us are more intelligent, some less; some more emotionally intelligent, some less; some more athletic, some less; some more productive in giving to society, some less, some even taking more than they give. Now, it’s true that science has shown that, taken as groups, we are all very much the same (some highly controversial studies even differ on that). But individuals are not at all the same.

People as individuals differ, groups are similar, at least on a biological level. What ethical imperative flows from that? About a hundred years ago, it was forced sterilization and other eugenics programs. Now, Clark says that the ruling value is that people should be allowed to “develop their full potential.” This sounds suspiciously like Maslow, whose “Hierarchy of Needs” has, unfortunately for Maslow and possibly also for Clark, not been supported by empirical research. Regardless of that, what empirical study showed that individuals developing their full potential is more important than the improvement of the race? Now, I certainly do believe that individual growth is a better ethical idea than eugenic manipulation, but I didn’t get gather that opinion from an empirical study, and I don’t think Tom Clark could have, either.

Further, suppose people were much markedly similar to each other than they are in fact. How would that fact make equal treatment an ethical imperative? It seems that “equal treatment” was picked out of the empirical air.

But in fact it wasn’t. It comes from historical roots, for example, “All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator…” And those historical roots have roots themselves. The principle of equality was never one of empirical observation, but of theological reflection. The only relevant sense in which humans are equal is in worth, but worth is not an empirical concept at all. How is it measured? How could it be? No, equality is a matter of our standing before God. As a matter of historical fact, this conception of human equality arose out of Christian roots. Agreed, it took time to flourish, but it’s no accident that is has never flourished anywhere but in lands informed by Biblical beliefs.

Now, this post is running long, and it was not my primary purpose to establish the validity of Christian ethics or to defend their historical expression. (Timothy Keller does a great job of this in this talk: mp3 download.) Rather, my main purpose has been to explore two of Tom Clark’s central beliefs: that the only reliable route to knowledge is the empirical one, and that there are ethical obligations binding upon us, including the obligation to be empiricists. I think he can maintain those two beliefs as long as he does not try to impose the first one on the second one. If he does, he will find that on his terms of knowledge, his knowledge of ethics has no standing.

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In my previous posts on Mary Midgley’s view of morality, I noted my appreciation for her unwillingness to accept reductionist explanations (especially for human experience), and her nearly answering a lifelong question of mine: is there really no way to ground a solid sense of morality apart from God? At the end of each post I wrote that there was nevertheless something lacking. As I put it most recently,

Thankfully, what is lacking is not interest, for as I said, it is the closest I’ve found to a positive answer for my lifelong question. Yet there are at least two specific and serious shortcomings that I will return to in my next post on this topic.

So I proceed now, with respect for the questions she raised. Let me reprise my two-sentence summary of her take on morality:

Morality is the means by which a reflective species arbitrates the competing demands of various naturally derived motives/motivations, which are in some way shared with or consistent with motives/motivations of related creatures, and which have a genuine reality of their own, not susceptible to scientistic reductionism. This takes place both individually and socially, and its chief benefit is in allowing the reflective being to make decisions and to behave consistently with long-term social and individual motives higher than short-term motives.

Does this suffice? The question I had early in college was this, quoting again from my last post on this:

Why couldn’t I just do anything at all? What was really wrong with getting drunk, having all the sex I wanted (whether the woman wants it or not), cheating in class? I couldn’t think of any reason not to do those things, other than that I’d been raised differently. That wasn’t enough.

I had not read Dostoyevsky yet, but I was running into what he said so succinctly: “Without God, everything is permitted.” But that just seemed impossible to me. There had to be some difference between right and wrong. Yet I couldn’t think of any way that difference could make sense without God.

It’s time now to explore how well she answers questions like mine.

I was describing Midgley’s book The Ethical Primate to my seventeen-year-old son, and he fairly cut me short, saying, “Ask her how she knows what’s right and what’s wrong.” Now, he hadn’t read the book, and I hadn’t given him a very thorough description, but that was a great question anyway, because until he said that, I hadn’t noticed that the words right and wrong never appear in the book, in the context of moral evaluation—not that I’ve conducted a full computer-assisted search, but I’m pretty sure they don’t appear anywhere in there. For Midgley, morals are apparently not about right and wrong.

Yet her morality is not relativistic, it is objective; but it is contingently objective. Morality is a set of rules summarizing what we works for the long-term good of the species. If through evolutionary contingencies the species had turned out different than it had, the long-term good might very likely have been different; and therefore if anything like morality had appeared in that case, such morality would also be different. It’s hard to imagine it being so different that, say, total wanton mutual destruction was advantageous. It is not so hard, however, to imagine evolution leading to a world where theft, total selfishness, hatred, incest, Machiavellian power maneuvering, race-centrism, and so on were applauded. Our own attitudes on these ethical issues could have come out differently than they did.

To which Midgley simply says, “but they didn’t.” We have the ethics we have because we are what we are. “Live with it,” she might add (I’m putting words in her mouth here), “Our sense of morality is the contingent product of our contingent evolutionary history, but the way it is, is the way it is.” I find there is something attractive about that answer. (This is why I found her book so captivating.) It’s reality-based, within limits I’ll come to later. And it’s objective, in that it’s focused on something very definable, something almost concrete: the longer-term motivations of the organism and species, grounded in what evolution has made us to be. Why should I ask for more than that?

Here’s why. First, what Midgley offers is, in the end, the morality of what works; or, more accurately, it’s the morality of what has worked, in proto-fashion for our evolutionary relatives and forebears, and now in full fashion among humans. We developed rules because they helped us keep our behavioral motivations in line with our longer-term interests. The rules have nothing to do with what is right or wrong, for there is no such category for Midgley. Perhaps she uses those terms elsewhere, but surely if she does, they function only as a language shortcut to “that which guides/does not guide us to behave consistently with our long-term motivations.”

Some of my correspondents on this blog have responded to this kind of statement in the past by saying, “That view of right and wrong is sufficient, Tom. You’re stacking the question in your favor when you call for something beyond that for right and wrong.” Perhaps, but I think I do it justifiably, because I am quite sure that most of the time when we (including my correspondents) say, “That was just wrong!” we don’t mean, “that didn’t work for the long-term interests of the species!” If right and wrong really mean to us, “what works for the long-term interest of the species,” then I would say Mary Midgley’s account of it was more than adequate. I just don’t believe that’s what we mean when we use the words.

Or are we just confused? Maybe right and wrong actually should mean to us,”that which works for the long-term good of the species.” Here we approach my second objection to Midgley’s ethics. It’s one I am loathe to register, because it’s so closely related to something I appreciate so much about her. It’s her insistence on explaining human experience non-reductively. As I wrote before, she won’t accept reductivist physical/chemical explanations for who and what we are, because (like all of us) she just knows better. Our freedom, our human agency, our thoughts, our decisions, our emotions—in all these things we know that it is we who are doing the acting, deciding, thinking, feeling. We are not unwitting and unwilling passengers on a train of physical/chemical reactions.

I agree with her on that, but I cannot credit that evolution got us here. There is too great a disconnect between the presumed processes of evolution and the observed result. Midgley carries on fierce disputes with Richard Dawkins with respect to his Selfish Gene idea, and with other reductivists for similar reasons. She has little positive to say for Daniel Dennett’s views on consciousness. She differs with them for good reason, because their positions clearly do not accord with life as we observe it and experience it. Yet they have a powerful position in the secular debate nevertheless, for they take seriously what evolution is and what it says. Given naturalism as a starting point, where from the beginning there has been nothing but matter and energy, and their interactions by necessity (natural law) and chance processes, human agency and freedom could only appear by magic. That which makes us human was never in the building blocks, nor in the mortar, nor even in the blueprint from the beginning; for the only blueprint was, try one thing after another and keep what reproduces successfully (and even that is unacceptably anthropomorphized, but it sure is hard to keep that out of one’s language on these things).

Thus Midgley’s morality must—I hate to say it but I must—reduce to “what motivates/does not motivate our species to long-term reproductive advantage.” If there is any other motivating force besides that, where did it come from? For evolution itself knows of no other force directing behavior (I am of course speaking of naturalistic evolution). Midgley’s take on human freedom is likewise cut off from the reality of its roots. It’s there, but on her terms it is completely unexplained. It popped out of thin air, and no less so if it “popped” gradually, having appeared first in the whales, dolphins, octopi, and lower primates. It still appeared from nowhere. Atoms and molecules, genes and proteins—they do what they must do according to chance and necessity. Who are we as humans to think we can interfere with that?

Our longer-term motivations are not toward the longer-term good, unless we say that good means “for reproductive advantage, of the individual, group, or species.” But there is a further problem. I made an unannounced shift in terms a few paragraphs ago. I said, “Maybe right and wrong actually should mean to us, ‘that which works for the long-term good of the species.’” Before that, though, I had been using Midgley’s terms, describing morality as “”that which guides… us to behave consistently with our long-term motivations.” Without notice or explanation, I shifted from talking about long-term motivations to long-term good. Shame on me! But—did you notice? Or were you yourself ready and willing to equate long-term motivations with long-term good? It’s an easy mistake to fall into, but what are these motivations? Does the term good really apply to them? How so? They’re what evolution gave us. What makes that good? No matter what evolution had given us as motivations, that’s what we would have. If whatever you get from evolution is what you’re going to call “good,” then “good” just means, “whatever you have.” That’s pretty weak.

So now I will circle back around again to my short statement of Midgley’s moral theory. She says morality is what allows us, as reflective organisms, to manage our behavior according to the long-term good. But we have discovered that this really means that morality is what allows us as reflective organisms to manage our behavior according to long-term reproductive advantage. From where did we gain our intelligence, language, and capacity for reflection? From evolution, which, you recall, has no motivating force but reproductive success. We’re about to spin in a dizzy circle now: The advantage morality gains us is reproductive success. The reflective abilities we have were formed by a process that had no end in mind but reproductive success. The development and propagation of those reflective abilities has been driven by one force: reproductive success.

There are no philosophers more reductivistic than Paul and Patricia Churchland. I believe it was Patricia who said everything in the natural world comes down to natural selection’s four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing. (Pardon me, but that’s what she said.) Midgley wants to accept the reality of human experience, while also accepting evolution as our creator. Unfortunately for her, the two really cannot be melded. Her version of morality doesn’t fit her picture of reality, for her picture of reality is itself hopelessly disjointed; nothing could fit it. So like all other non-theistic moral systems I’ve had opportunity to survey, this one, too, falls short.

Finally, and very quickly and without developing them, I must mention two last problems I have with Midgley’s moral system. First, the longer-term motivations of organisms make for an incredibly vague starting point for moral theorizing. What does this tell us about, say, supporting or opposing homosexual rights, or abortion? I think that any answer could be argued.

Second, I must raise a reminder here of what I wrote last time. My search for a satisfactory secular morality comes from a specific source: I was looking for it in college, I never found it then, and I’ve been curious since then whether such a thing exists. It seemed incredible to me at that young age that nothing of the sort was possible, and that sense of surprise has never quite let go of me. As I said once before, it also surprised me, and in a way worried me, that this was something I more or less figured out as a very green college freshman!) Along the way, though, I found another source and system for morality, in the triune God and his word. I’m certainly not dissatisfied with that. I’m very confident that God exists and he has spoken; thus Midgley’s morality, which excludes that reality, fails on that count also.

The Ethical Primate, though possibly the best book I’ve read on evolution and human experience as we know it, still fails to explain how the one could realistically have led to the other.

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Edward Feser’s prediction:

And things are only going to get worse. Much much worse. Brace yourselves.

Read why he thinks so. I’m afraid he’s probably right.

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