Thinking Christian

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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I was not a believer in Jesus Christ when I left home for college in 1974. My brother and I had both been very interested in the occult, and around that time I must have read dozens of books by people like Ruth Montgomery and Jeanne Dixon, purveyors of belief in psychic phenomena. My recent church experience had not been at all good, and I didn’t know of any reason to believe in Jesus Christ.

I had no real beliefs about ultimate reality at all, in fact. So, being on my own for the first time, and having the opportunity to do whatever I wanted, I very quickly realized all limits were off. I’m sure I was not the only college freshman who has discovered that! But there was a question that haunted me: 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.

Several months later I decided to follow Jesus Christ. There were many of reasons for that decision, including the genuine love of Christians I had come to know there at school, and the evidences for Christ’s resurrection they shared with me. One contributing factor, though, was that I knew that in Christ there was a genuine answer to this question of right and wrong, that there was real grounding for real ethics.

I couldn’t leave it there, though. The same question still followed me like a specter: Is there really no way, apart from God, to make sense of right and wrong? Could I have missed something? I took an ethics course to find out what the philosophers said. We concentrated on modern philosophy in that course, starting with Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, continuing through John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, and ending up with de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity. What I recall most clearly was that they were all significantly flawed, even in the opinion of my very secular professor, who said plainly that there was no solid plane on which to ground an ethical system.

Even that was not the end of it. Maybe he was wrong, too. Ever since then, I’ve kept my eyes open for other moral explanations that could conceivably make sense apart from God. I’ve never been able to let the search go. Part of the reason for that, I think, is knowing how young I was when I first thought this through, and how unlikely it was that a really uneducated college freshman like me could have gotten this right. Knowing how I first came to my conclusion, I’ve remained somewhat suspicious of it.

So over the years, not constantly, perhaps, but at least persistently, I’ve been looking. I’ve gone back to Plato and Aristotle, and I’ve spent time with other modern thinkers. I’ve learned that the current secular consensus seems to be either (a) that there are objective moral values, genuine right and wrong, anchored in virtually nothing at all (Michael Martin is an example of that thinking), or (b) that there is no right and wrong at all. Michael Ruse, for example, says morality is nothing more than a useful evolutionary fiction. Such relativism is extremely common among evolutionary thinkers, and it dominates the arts and humanities—and thus most of Western culture today.

Mary Midgley is different. That’s why I’ve read her book The Ethical Primate not once but twice this week (twice for the latter half, that is, where she details her ethical theory). More than any other writer I’ve encountered, she comes close to showing how genuine ethics could exist without God. This book has been a significant contrast to (for example) Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, which was well written all the way through, but in the end very disappointing for its insanely weak anti-theistic argumentation. Migley made it very interesting for me, because she almost got there.

What makes her account of morality compelling is that she takes the data of humanness very seriously, while also recognizing what evolution says about our continuity with the animal kingdom, and with that she has developed something very much like an objective version of morality. I’ve tried to distill her account of ethics down to two sentences:

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.

In other words, we, like all animals, have numerous competing drives and motivations. Some of them are short-term (she calls them “acute”) and some long-term (“chronic”). The longer-term motivations, like care for one’s family, are more advantageous in the long run, but as driving forces they are not as immediately powerful as the short-term ones. An intelligent, reflective species such as ourselves needs moral rules to guide us toward keeping the long-term motivations in charge of our behavior. Thus Midgley’s version of morality is grounded in a genuine recognition of who we are as humans, while also connected to our evolutionary roots. It may be a contingent morality, in that the species we are could have turned out differently than it did under other evolutionary circumstances; but we are what we are, and not (as she says) “Aldebaranians or Daleks.” Given who we are, morality is not arbitrary or relative, because it points us towards the long-haul good, for ourselves and our species.

So what is lacking in it? 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.

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Reading Mary Midgley has produced rather a shock to my system. My prior exposure to non-theistic thinking on evolution, ethics, human freedom, and meaning has been dominated by reductionists like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Midgley’s approach, by comparison, is practically heretical among evolutionists who do not believe in God: she actually takes humans seriously for what we know we are. Nick Matzke recommended her 1994 book The Ethical Primate to me a few weeks ago, and I just finished it this afternoon, amazingly within an hour or so of when Kevin Winters emailed me a link to her recent article Purpose, Meaning & Darwinism. (A sincere “thank you” goes to both Nick and Kevin.)

In both the book and the article she breaks decisively from scientistic reductivism, arguing that it’s a hopelessly failed approach to explaining anything above the level of physics or chemistry. What we are, who we are, what we dream of and long for, how we relate socially, how and why we think, how we determine what’s important—none of this, she says, will ever be explainable by breaking it into its smallest pieces, even conceptually, as physicists take protons apart to find quarks.

You can get a flavor of this by reading the linked article. For example,

Some people are therefore now beginning to suspect that the mind/matter rift may be better dealt with differently – perhaps in the way that Spinoza proposed, by not letting it arise in the first place. Perhaps there are not two radically different kinds of stuff, mind and matter, but just one great world-stuff which has both mental and physical attributes, that can then quite properly be viewed without contradiction from both these angles. Then it would not be surprising if a single tendency, or conatus, runs through the whole, so that our kind of conscious purposiveness is only one part of the goal-directedness of nature.

Such talk is out of fashion, of course. But the current sweeping denial of purpose outside human life is certainly no less metaphysically ambitious. It only strikes us as less surprising because we are so used to it. Yet exclusive materialism is not a scientific discovery but an extreme philosophical doctrine…. It is true that the concept of purpose is not used in physics; but then physics is not in the business of trying to explain life. If our aim is to understand a world which includes ourselves, with our thoughts, as well as the other organisms, we need concepts that will explain this.

Such talk is indeed out of fashion. “Goal-directedness of nature?” That’s not at all the way most evolutionists speak. Midgley, a British philosopher, has been labeled Britain’s “foremost scourge of ’scientific pretension.’” Though she is certainly an exponent of evolution, I rather doubt she would appreciate being labeled an evolutionist in the same way that Richard Dawkins is an evolutionist. She disagrees with him mightily, especially in his reducing all of life to a “selfish gene.” She draws from a rich data set that ranges from ethology to existentialism, derived from a wide range of literature, philosophy, and science. In the first hundred pages of The Ethical Primate she shows that reductivism is too simple, too monistic, too narrow-minded, and too stubbornly ignorant of what human life really is, to have much value at all for explaining human life and behavior. (She doesn’t think much of it even as an explanation for plant or animal life.)

I breezed through those hundred pages, generally nodding my head in agreement, appreciating her insistence that people are actually people: we’re not just gene-machines, and our thoughts, beliefs, and feelings (relating to more current discussions in science now) are not just what happens when electrons and chemicals chug around from place to place in our brains. “It can’t be that simple,” she repeatedly said. It did strike me as strange, though, the way she dismissed Christianity on page 110:

The other account, the Christian one, explains morality as our necessary attempt to bring our deeply imperfect nature into line with God’s will. Its origin-myth is the Fall of Man, a choice which has rendered our nature radically imperfect in the way described—again symbolically— in the Book of Genesis. It is not surprising that these two simple accounts [Rousseuaian and Christian] have been popular. Simplicity itself is always welcome in a confusing world, and each of the does contains some real insights. But simple accounts cannot explain complex facts, and it is clear that neither of these can really deal with our questions. The Christian account shifts the problem rather than solving it, since we wtill need to know why we should acknowledge God’s authority. Christian teaching has of course plenty to say about this, but what it says is complex, and cannot keep its attractive simplicity once this question is raised.

I’m sure she has other reasons than this for thinking Christian answers are inadequate, but this one is odd. After a hundred pages on reductivism being too simple, urging us to look for multiple layers of explanation for multiple-layered questions, she complains that Christianity “cannot keep its attractive simplicity” once a question has been raised. What does she want? If Christianity kept its simplicity, surely she would reject it for that reason, too. But in fact she simply assumes it is wrong, without addressing its answers to the questions she has raised.

The second half of The Ethical Primate was less familiar territory and thus slower going for me. This is where she takes her commitment to wholistic humanness on the one hand, and naturalistic evolution on the other, and tries to wed them together to produce a meaningful ethic. It’s a wedding from which most other writers, like nervous grooms, have run flat-footed. I must return later to discuss why I do not think she has succeeded in hitching the two together, but I want to dwell a moment now on what did make sense about her approach. I’ve already stated the crux of it: she accepts the data of humanness. Theists have always recognized this data as real, from the first chapters of Genesis through more recent writers like C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man) and Wiker and Witt (A Meaningful World: How the Arts And Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature). Naturalists more commonly have seemed to reject it, at least as far as I have seen. Consider E.O. Wilson, whom Midgley quotes on page 5:

Human behavior—like the deepest capacities for emotional response which drive and guide it—is the circuitous technique by which human genetic material has been and will be kept intact. Morality has no other demonstrable ultimate function.

Similarly Richard Dawkins, quoted right after Wilson,

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

Midgley might say (though she did not do so here) that the reason this “truth” so astonishes Dawkins is because everybody knows it isn’t truth, and on some level he must know, too. “Folk psychology,” the common-sense everyday understanding we have of ourselves, is not so unreflective and pre-theoretic as, say, folk chemistry (cooking, for example). It’s been tested through the ages. We know what we know about ourselves, and this talk of “no other demonstrable ultimate function” and “blindly programmed to serve the selfish molecules” is unbelievable because we know better than to believe it.

Midgley wrote this book in 1994. Who since then has bought into her philosophy? There’s very little evidence that her objections have daunted Dawkins since then, or put any dent in Dennett.* Will Provine still says there is no such thing as free will, purpose, or ethics. Michael Ruse still considers ethics to be a “collective illusion of the genes.” Naturalism, in other words, continues its reductive ways. Especially in neuroscience, this tendency continues to show up frequently even in the news media and other popular press. Still, Midgley’s question is a great one: can human nature, as we genuinely understand it, be united with a naturalistic view of origins, and can that in turn lead to a coherent view of ethics? She thinks it can. My opinion on that will appear in another blog post in a day or two.

*Whether her opinions have harried Sam Harris or put a hitch into Christopher Hitchens—the other New Atheist “Gang of Four” members, as I call them—is a matter of conjecture, since they don’t write as much on these topics.

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