Thinking Christian

Much of the discussion about ethics revolves around an analogy to matters of personal preference. doctor(logic) recently said,

Morality bears all the hallmarks of something subjective, like taste in food or taste in art.

And also,

My argument is that, unlike the objective sciences, morality has no more basis for objectivity than the things we regard as subjective (food, music, etc). In particular, there is no formal evidence that moral opinions are objective facts because the only thing predicted by morality is how members of our species feel about certain acts.

It seems to me that this analogy fails right where it counts most. I like chocolate and I dislike Brussels sprouts. I do not therefore conclude that chocolate is right and Brussels sprouts are wrong, or that eating one is right and the other wrong. It’s a completely different internal apprehension for these things than it is for murder or torturing children, or for loving and giving.

Morality predicts more than “how members of our species feel.” It predicts persons’ convictions and beliefs; and yes, we can tell the difference between feelings and convictions. The moral sense is not just one of personal liking or appreciation. It carries with it an incorrigible sense of rightness vs. wrongness. We do say that murder is wrong and that being a loving person is right, and most of us, when we say these things, believe they are actually true statements, not mere expressions of preference.

Granted there is some analogy between gastronomic or aesthetic taste and moral beliefs. The moral subjectivist can rightly say that the moral sense is another instance of personal preference or aversion, just as matters of taste are. We all say things like “I like chocolate,” and “I like it when people get along well.”

But when he says it is just another instance of personal preference or aversion he goes beyond what this analogy can support. We say things like “Murder is wrong,” but we do not say things like “Brussels sprouts are wrong.” But this is precisely the question of moral realism: whether statements like “murder is wrong” are really true. Any thoughtful person would say that “Brussels sprouts are wrong” is not a true statement. Only someone whose metaphysical views have successfully overridden his native knowledge would deny that “murder is wrong” is a true statement.

The analogy between morality and matters of taste fails at the point where we speak of something’s being actually true. And that’s exactly the point that matters.

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This post differs from many others on this blog in that I am going to base it on my settled belief in the God of the Bible, and not try to make an argument this time in favor of that belief. In other words, you will agree with this or not based on your existing beliefs regarding God and the Bible. Or maybe, just maybe, by seeing how one atheist treats morality, some skeptics, agnostics, or atheists will come to recognize that to deny the God of the Bible is to take up a seriously untenable view of life.

In comments following my post on The Basis for Moral Realism, doctor(logic) has persistently stuck with his opinion that morality must be evaluated and regarding strictly in terms of one’s feelings. You can pick up that line of his starting about here.

As Thomas Reid wisely pointed out,

A feeling is a temporary state of sensory, subjective experience. It has different properties than a belief. It is not possible for a feeling to be true or false (my “happiness” is not false).

So we see that a feeling is not a belief, and therefore it is impossible for one to have a feeling of a moral proposition. This is not to say that feelings cannot have beliefs as their causual antecedents, of course.

Nevertheless, we cannot deny that there are propositions that can be attached to feelings. “I feel good,” or “Seeing people hurt makes me sad” are both propositions about feelings. But these are statements about self. So when doctor(logic) insists that all moral opinions and evaluations are feelings statements, he is saying that all moral opinions and evaluations are made with reference to self. Moral opinions are not about acts, he would say; they are about my reactions to acts.

doctor(logic) confirmed this by saying,

What do I mean when I say morality is subjective? I mean that if I draw a line around the mugger and his victim, morality is nowhere to be found there. But if I draw the line around you (as observer), the mugger and his victim, then morality is objectively in your preferences. It will be an objective fact that you will disapprove or feel bad about the mugging you are observing. However, the immorality will not be in the mugging itself.

Is mugging good? No, it’s not good. Is mugging bad? No, it’s not bad either. It’s neither, in itself. But you may disapprove or feel bad about it. That’s what morality is, to doctor(logic).

Even from a simply ethical perspective, this has a nasty, putrid, awful smell to it. It literally makes morality all about one’s preferences. It makes me my own king of morality. It is idol-worship of the worst kind, for it is self-worship, putting self in the place where all good and evil is decided, the place that is rightfully God’s.

On this view I can—or must, for I cannot avoid it—set up my own moral system over and against God’s. Quoting from doctor(logic) again:

Look, let’s suppose Horace is a rapist. He likes raping for lots of reasons, including the feeling of power he gets. He thinks that girls who dress in revealing clothes deserve it. He’s integrated his rape behavior into his personal identity. Jesus comes along and says that rape is objectively evil. If Horace believes Jesus is real, tells the truth, and is an authority on morality, wouldn’t Horace then be in some sort of conflict?

Which is followed by,

To Horace, God is subjectively evil, even if he believed God was objectively good.

doctor(logic) thinks Horace’s view is to be taken as equivalent to God’s. The next paragraph says,

If my space ship approaches yours, and relatively, our ships are inverted, I could say you were subjectively upside down. If the universe had an objective “up” direction, we might agree that you were right-side-up, but you would still be subjectively upside down to me.

Space ship 1 or space ship 2, neither has authority over the other. Horace or God, neither (says dl) has authority over the other.

Idolatry always leads to corruption. The form of corruption that comes from this particular idolatry, making oneself king over one’s own morality, is not just that one might decide to do anything, and call it right. It is not just that every person can be right in his or her own eyes. It is both of these. But it also entails the plainly unethical view that morality is whatever suits me best. What could be more obviously wrong than that?

This is the characteristic idolatry of our generation. It is the idolatry that at this point is likely astonished that I would state the matter so bluntly and negatively, and would fault me for doing so. But if I am wrong and these idolaters are right, then there is no fault in my act, just as there is no fault in mugging. The only charge they can bring against me is, “That made me feel bad! If you make me feel bad, then you’re an awful person!” My answer to that is, I do not glory in making others feel bad. I do not like to do it. But I do not accept feelings as ruling sovereignly over what is actually true, and sometimes idolatry must be confronted for what it is.

Moral relativism is idolatry. Those who do not know that God is the only God may not recognize the malodorous nature of this idolatry, but those who do know God in this way must realize that it is a stench in his nostrils.

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From Franklin Mason:

Thus if we cling to our moral views – as we ought and should – we reveal that we are not relativists. If we know what we are to do tomorrow – and we do – we are not relativists.

The Philosophical Midwife: What are we to do tomorrow?

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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.

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Truth In the Fire
I have written appreciatively twice of Dallas Willard lately. Now I turn to his article, Truth in the Fire: C.S. Lewis and Pursuit of Truth Today: Publications: The Independent Institute. Originally delivered as a lecture ten years ago at the C.S. Lewis Centennial at Oxford University, this paper springboards from Lewis’s understanding of Truth, and attacks being made upon it in Lewis’s time, to a more contemporary discussion of the same issue. (Dallas Willard is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California.)

Everything we believe, everything we understand about the world, hinges on this issue. A colleague of mine has written a book (now out of print), God Is the Issue. I do not intend to say that Truth is above God, or more important than God. But God is consistently identified in his Word as the source of Truth, and as Truth himself (2 Samuel 22:32, Psalm 18:30, John 5:31-32, John 7:18, John 14:6, 1 John 5:20).

The Truth that is in God is multi-faceted: it involves his personal faithfulness, his consistency, his keeping his word, his integrity. It also involves what is technically, somewhat coldly perhaps, called propositional truth: that which allows us to affirm or to deny that something is in fact true in a meaningful sense (see Deuteronomy 18:22, 2 Samuel 7:28, John 19:35, Acts 26:25, 2 Corinthians 7:14).

Propositional truth itself is “In the Fire,” the phrase Willard uses in the title of his paper. Postmodern-leaning Christians often dismiss it: “How can you reduce the truth of God to mere propositions?” But that of course is a straw man. To insist on the reality of propositional truth is not to deny the other various aspects of God’s truth, any more than to insist that birds can fly is to deny they can sing. God can be (and is) personally faithful, at the same time that statements regarding him (or other subjects) may be true or false.

Rumors of Relativity
Of course the question is not raised only in regard to God. Propositional truth is denied on general terms, or is accepted only on the understanding that it is not objective. Truth is relative, they say. As Willard puts it:

In the face of present attitudes, however, even earnestness about truth—also about goodness and beauty—is definitely uncool. It might be tolerated in a Freshman. But he or she would be expected to wise up quickly, and might pay a stiff price for not doing so. The idea of devoting one’s life to truth, goodness or beauty is now quaint if not ridiculous, on the campus as in the corporation. They are not considered to be objective realities against which human life is or can be measured.

To encourage you to read the whole article, I’ll pick up a few points from it. First, on this belief that all truth is relative, Willard disagrees, to put it mildly. I stand with him.

All this puts us in position to see that, while belief is relative—a fact or statement is believed only if someone believes it—truth is not relative. One believes something, one does not truth it or fact it. Again, we can and should experiment with this. Try getting your car to run by believing gas is in your tank. Or by also enlisting others to believe it, or by generating a social movement in favor of it.

Pilate’s Question
But what do we mean by “truth?” Willard dares (such audacity!) to suggest an explanation, including,

When the object of our belief or statement is as we believe or state it to be, when it “matches up” to that object in the familiar way already indicated by cases, our belief or statement is true. Truth is just this characteristic of “matching up.” Otherwise our belief or statement is false. Truth and falsity are, then, objective properties of beliefs and statements….

For a belief, thought or statement to be true is simply for its subject matter to be as it is represented, or as it is held to be, in that belief, thought or statement. When we confirm that a hitherto unconfirmed belief or statement is true, we do not create the relation (correspondence) it actually has to what it is about, any more that we create the fit of a wrench to a bolt head by placing the wrench on the bolt head, or the fit of a door to a frame by putting the door in the frame….

Moreover, truth, as we have seen in the case of fact and reality, is totally unyielding in the face of belief, desire, tradition and will. There is no such thing as a belief or statement whose quality of truth or falsity is modified by mere belief or disbelief, desire or aversion, habit or tradition or social practice or professional opinion, or will and intent. We state it once again: belief is relative, as are our perceptions, but truth is not. Truth is a relation, a “correspondence,” but not one that depends upon belief or attitude….

A dignitary such as Pontius Pilate or a university professor can well say, rhetorically, “What is truth?” But that is never accepted as a response from a child being interrogated about vanished cookies, nor will a child accept it as an explanation of a broken promise. They know what truth is very well, even though, as they also know, it is not easy to determine in some cases. —Is it true there is a Santa Claus, for example, or a tooth fairy?

Is that so complicated, now? Well, of course there are issues attending this matter of truth, which Willard acknowledges in his paper. But the central foundation of it was never challenged for century upon century. It was only when men began to doubt everything except the evidence of their senses that they began to doubt such a thing as truth exists. Intuitively it is obvious even to a child; but intuitions don’t boil in a beaker, and they don’t generate a satisfyingly measurable electrical field, so the empiricists thought they must not be real. Never mind that (as Willard points out) they could not determine they were unreal without depending on their being real.

Why It Matters So
And why is this such a crucial matter? Simply this: without the ability to speak a true statement, to affirm a true proposition, then one cannot say things like,

• “God is love.”
• “Jesus Christ is the Word of God become flesh, full of grace and truth.”
• “Eternal life is found in Jesus Christ.”

These things cannot either be affirmed or denied. They are without content. They may be opinions, but they can be neither right nor wrong.

Further, without the ability to affirm something as true (even potentially), the following cannot be said, even to disagree with them:

• Opinions about God are without content.
• They may be opinions, but they can neither be right nor wrong.
• These things cannot be said, even to disagree with them.
• Nothing in fact can be affirmed as actually true, or denied as being actually false.

I hope you’ve noticed this is turning self-referential, as the philosophers put it. A self-referential statement is one like, “The sentence I am now writing is ten words long.” That happens to be true, if I counted right. Here’s another self-referential statement. “The statement I am now writing is false.” That one is not only false, it is incoherent, impossible; it cannot be true unless it is false; it cannot be false without being true. A better description for it is nonsense.

In a similar sense, if all truth is relative then the last several bulleted statements above are true, but if they are true propositions, then there are no true propositions. They are in the same condition as “This statement is false.” If they are true, then they are false.

Desperate Separation
One who denies truth denies all affirmations, all denials, all discourse. The result is not only to remain desperately separated from God, also to create a whole new kind of separation from each other. We can talk to each other, but your words and mine have no common referent, no meaning in common. You speak your language and I mine, but we can have no shared understanding: for there is no objective reality out there for us to share in.

It is a philosophy of absurdity. More grievous than that, though, it is a philosophy of utter alienation.

Hat tip (three weeks ago, saved until I had time to work on it): Victor Reppert

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I gave this talk at Seaford Baptist Church on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. Some portions have been edited out because they’re not applicable to a wider audience.

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This talk on Views of Truth was given on March 9 to the Chapel at Kingsmill. I regret that I had no control over the recording method–the microphone was far from the front of the room, so there’s room noise. It’s still audible and listen-able in spite of that, though.

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