Thinking Christian

There are two groups of people in the world: those who divide the world into two groups of people, and those who do not.

No, really, there are two groups of people in the world with respect to moral opinions: moral realists and moral relativists. Broadly speaking, moral realists believe that there are at least some moral values that are objective. Objective means (as William Lane Craig says) that these values would hold as valid or true even if nobody on earth agreed with them. Moral relativists, in contrast, generally hold that all moral values are generated or constructed out of persons’ or cultures’ beliefs. They may believe there is a certain kind of reality to moral values, that values are not arbitrary; but this reality is the product of individual or social beliefs, not some ultimate source beyond human culture.

The following is a True/False Quiz that anyone can take. Do you consider the following statements to be true or false?

1. (T/F) All moral values are entirely constructed or produced out of persons’ or cultures’ beliefs.

If you answered False, that’s it for you on this quiz. If you answered True, please continue:

2. (T/F) Let us assume that everybody in some cultural grouping G believes that some behavior B expresses a good and valid moral value. (It doesn’t really matter what B is.) For that culture, at that time and in those conditions, B is good.

3. (T/F) Another cultural group H may disagree with G on this, but nevertheless for GB is still good; for cultures may validly hold different opinions on moral values. H’s disagreement with G does not make B bad or wrong in itself, it only makes it bad or wrong for H.

4. (T/F) Suppose there is no group H that disagrees that B is good. Then everyone would be in group G, and would agree that B is good. For that time and in those conditions at least, B is therefore good for everybody. It is a universal good in the sense that it is universally shared by all persons then living, though not in the sense that its value comes from somewhere beyond the persons who have made it a value.

5. (T/F) In most cultures of the world, the Holocaust of WW II is regarded as having been a severe moral evil.

6. (T/F) If, however, Hitler had won the war, and if he (and his followers) had been able to exterminate or brainwash everyone who thought the Holocaust was evil, then the situation would be like that of (4), where every person in the world agreed that the Holocaust was morally good. (This example also follows one given by W.L. Craig.)

7. (T/F) In that case, the Holocaust would be correctly regarded by the remaining population as having been morally good.

Self-check: compare your answers to (4) and (7).

We’re not done yet, though…

8. (T/F) Some remaining persons (call them Group H again) may think it was morally evil to massacre and/or brainwash the dissenters. Those persons themselves (the members of Group H) could conceivably be brainwashed and/or killed by the others (Group G), so that every remaining person would then be a member of group G and would believe the following:

(a) To exterminate the Jews was a morally good goal.
(b) To kill and/or brainwash those who disagreed with (a) was morally good.
(c) To kill and/or brainwash those who dissented from (b) was also morally good.

9. (T/F) With no Group H, and with every person alive believing that 8(a), 8(b), and 8(c) were morally good, then those moral beliefs would indeed be universally good, taking “universal” as described in (4).

10 (T/F) In other words, relativism could coherently lead to a possible world, as philosophers term it, in which the Holocaust was morally good, and where brainwashing or killing off all possible dissent was also morally good–universally so, in fact. This moral good, as suggested in (9), would rest on a much stronger social foundation than, say, the current common Western belief that slavery is wrong. It would in fact be more clearly good than current beliefs that slavery is wrong.

Self-check: compare your answers to (9) and (10) with your answer to (4).

And that suggests the following final item in our short quiz:

11. (T/F) It would violate a solidly established universal moral norm, and would rightly be regarded as reprehensible, to suggest that is wrong to kill dissenters just for believing that persons ought to have the freedom of their beliefs.

From this you see one reason I am not a moral relativist.

It’s below the surface, so I might just be imagining it (I’ve done that before); but is there a note of frustration in this Eurekalert article?

Scientific information largely ignored when forming opinions about stem cell research

For one thing, the headline is completely misleading. Where in this, for example, does it say that people are ignoring what they know about science?

“Highly religious audiences are different from less religious audiences. They are looking for different things, bringing different things to the table,” explains Scheufele. “It is not about providing religious audiences with more scientific information. In fact, many of them are already highly informed about stem cell research, so more information makes little difference in terms of influencing public support.”

“Highly religious audiences” bring more to their decision process than scientific information, probably because we know there’s more to the question than science. We do it just the same if we’re highly educated about the science or if we know little about it.

I think some scientists think that if everyone knew what they knew, they would believe what they believe. “More information makes little difference” - - that’s where I sense some frustration. But more information won’t change the fact that this is about embryonic stem cell research. No matter how much might be learned about human disease and health, these are still very young, defenseless, humans being experimented on. They’re not signing informed consent agreements. And we don’t sacrifice our babies to help ourselves.

Warning: disturbing topic ahead. Some readers will find some of this material objectionable.

I was a pump jockey when I was in high school, a noble profession that has almost disappeared in most of America. Not familiar with the term? I worked at a full-serve gas station, filling up gas tanks, checking oil, cleaning windshields. There are a couple states (Oregon and New Jersey, that I know of) that still do not permit self-serve gasoline stations, and they are the only places where my former career is still much plied.*

I was working there during the (first?) great gasoline shortages. The federal government prohibited the sale of gasoline on Sundays. One of my fellow workers there was incensed, and he thought he had a case to make against it. “It’s unconstitutional! The constitution guarantees us the pursuit of happiness, and my pursuit of happiness means being able to work my job on Sundays!”

Well, there are couple of problems with that, I tried to explain to him. (I didn’t bring up working on the Sabbath, that didn’t matter to me at the time.) First, “the pursuit of happiness” is nowhere in the Constitution. There is no such legal guarantee. It’s in the Declaration of Independence. Yes, it’s one of the ideas that led toward the founding of our country, but it’s just one among many, and it’s not enshrined as law.

Second, even if it were law, it’s just not quite that simple. Do we really think the government can take everybody’s idea of happiness into account, and make laws that work for all of them?

All this came to mind today as I was reading WorldNetDaily on “Bestiality ‘OK If Animal Approves.‘” That’s the opinion of gay rights activist Frank Kameny. There’s a lot that’s ridiculous in what they’re reporting on there, and much that’s quite horrifying, not least of which is this from Kameny:

“Absolutely indisputably a central part of the very definition of Americanism is the guarantee, found in the Declaration of Independence, as not merely a Right, but as an Inalienable Right, of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’” he wrote. “If something which someone arbitrarily defines as a ’sexual perversion’ provides happiness for consenting adult participants, then its enjoyment is enshrined in basic Americanism.

“So: Let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better sexual perversions, by whatever definition, by more and more consenting adults. We will all be the better off thereby. And that will be Americanism in action,” he said.

The morality is perverted there. I will not go into any further details on it here. The logic is perverted as well. Can you quite imagine Thomas Jefferson or James Madison agreeing that the last quoted sentence there represents Americanism in action?

What is it that produces this kind of thinking? First, there is sin, and the desire to normalize it to reduce guilt. In the famous Romans 1:18-32 passage that describes a progression into deeper and deeper depths of sin, the culmination is not sexual sin, murder, or hate. The list does not end with “foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless” (vs. 31, ESV). The culmination, the ultimate is

they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Need I point out how this is being practiced more and more in our culture, the California Supreme Court being a recent example?

Added to all that is the disdain Americans too often feel toward careful thinking. The logic of this ought not to seem so attractive, even to the man who stated it!

*Interestingly enough, that gas station stayed open as a full-service station, with self-serve competitors right across the street, until rising gas prices finally did it in just a few months ago. I don’t know how it survived that long; I was certainly sad to see it go.

Having written a four-part series on Francis Ayala’s Darwin’s Gift to Science and Religion, I was already in strong disagreement over what Ayala called a “gift” to religion in Darwinism. Now I’m reading his monograph for the AAAS, “The Difference of Being Human,” and have found even more reason to disagree with him on this. The core of his argument is

(1) that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, and (2) that moral norms are products of cultural evolution, not biological evolution.

I thought Biblical religion taught that moral norms flow from the character of God. Cultural evolution is no more friendly to Biblical religion than biological evolution; either way it contradicts what God has revealed about himself.

As far as I can remember (the book is back at the library now) Ayala did not mention this contingent, non-God-centered view of ethics in his book. Could that be because this is quite obviously not a gift to religion?

An “aesthetic argument for evolution”–I hope it’s obvious to you, just by looking at it that this is self-contradictory. When arguing from some fact to a worldview, one ought to be pointing toward a worldview that can accommodate the fact.

Richard Dawkins apparently takes an aesthetic argument as valid, yet as reported by Matt and Dana Higgins, he almost simultaneously supplies the material for his own refutation. They report from a lecture he gave in Austin,

[Dawkins says] “Evolution is more elegant than creationism.” In terms of evolution vs. creationism/intelligent design, he primarily argued from a point of aesthetics. His highly complex theories are preferable to the plain statement: “God did it.” Like saying that a couture dress is prettier than a dress made out of the living room curtains. Fans of “Gone With the Wind” may prefer the curtains. A matter of preference….

Later in the same talk he reportedly said,

Since there is no God and no moral reality, there is no morality that should be held by all persons at all times…. In “The God Delusion,” he strongly argues that morality evolves and changes with society (”the moral zeitgeist”).

So: apparently there is a strong enough argument for aesthetic realism/objectivity that we ought to take it as evidence on which to base our whole worldview. “Evolution is more elegant” is an objective fact, not a subjective opinion. But there is no moral reality. “Child abuse is wrong” is a subjective belief, not an objective fact. (Dawkins happens to agree with that subjective opinion, but that doesn’t make it objective in his mind.)

Does anybody see something being turned upside down there?

Ironically, this showed up (via Uncommon Descent) just minutes after I wrote this.

Robert Spencer writes of religion and slavery in world history, including:

[T]he pressure to end [slavery] moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists as its own and thereupon began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous precisely because of the audacity of the innovation that the British were proposing: “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day.”

…

There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well—notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States.

[From FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Slavery, Christianity, and Islam]
The entire article provides important historical and religious perspective on a practice that most tragically has not yet ended.

Following dozens of interactions here on the topic of moral relativism, it’s time to try to focus our discussions toward a more productive point.

Definitions
Moral realists (by way of review) believe that there are at least some moral principles that hold universally, objectively, and absolutely; they would obtain even if no human accepted them. These ultimate moral principles are grounded in God, at least in the view of realists who have been involved in discussion here. (Whether moral realism actually entails belief in God has not been much discussed here; we’ve all assumed the two beliefs are connected.)

Moral relativism is just the belief that there are no such absolute moral principles; that all morality without exception is based on some contingent circumstance (a circumstance that could be otherwise); that such circumstances typically involve some person or group of persons holding to particular moral principles; and that for every moral principle held by any person or group, it is at least conceivable that a contrary principle could be held by another person or group with equal justification. (more…)