Quote of the week - Schopenhauer on the basis of morality

"Now, since I do not live in his skin, there remains only the knowledge, that is, the mental picture, I have of him, as the possible means where- by I can so far identify myself with him, that my action declares the difference to be practically effaced. The process here analyzed is not a dream, a fancy floating in the air ; it is perfectly real, and by no means infrequent. It is, what we see every day, the phenomenon of Compassion ; in other words, the direct participation, independent of all ulterior considerations, in the sufferings of another, leading to sympathetic assistance in the effort to prevent or remove them ; whereon in the last resort all satisfaction and all well-being and happiness depend. It is this Compassion alone which is the real basis of all voluntary justice and all genuine loving-kindness. Only so far as an action springs therefrom, has it moral value ; and all conduct that proceeds from any other motive whatever has none. When once compassion is stirred within me, by another's pain, then his weal and woe go straight to my heart, exactly in the same way, if not always to the same degree, as otherwise I feel only my own. Consequently the difference between myself and him is no longer an absolute one.

No doubt this operation is astonishing, indeed hardly comprehensible. It is, in fact, the great mystery of Ethics, its original phenomenon, and the boundary stone, past which only transcendental speculation may dare to take a step. Herein we see the wall of partition, which, according to the light of nature (as reason is called by old theologians), entirely separates being from being, broken down, and the non-ego to a certain extent identified with the ego."

Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality Part III pg. 170-171

Free content on moral philosophy

For debates, definitions, book reviews/recommendations, and lecture mp3s check out click here. It will take you to apologetics315; an excellent site for audio. 

For in-depth encyclopedia articles on moral philosophy covering a wide scope of moral topics check out this; you'll be taken to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's all totally free content. You won't find video or audio though, only written content.

Glenn Peoples is an excellent, up-and-coming moral philosopher. So I'm including his blog in this list. Click here to read his work on moral philosophy.

Stand to Reason is a good source for commentaries and articles covering ethics. Click here to jump over there and start reading.

Below are some debates on morality and God.

Quote of the week - Nietzsche on morality and the master race

"Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions ... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Sec. 685 (Notebook W II 5. Spring 1888, KGW VIII, 3.95-7, KSA 13.303-5)

"The possibility has been established for the production of...a master race, the future "masters of the earth"...made to endure for millennia — a higher kind of men who...employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Sec. 960 (Notebook W I 8. Fall 1885 - Fall 1886, KGW VIII, 1.85-6, KSA 12.87-8)

Why I can't vote for Santorum

I have to say I'm not exactly super excited Santorum won yesterday. It seems the race has narrowed down to Romney versus Santorum. Given that the race is narrowed down to those two, I will vote for Romney because as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out "If elected, Romney must follow through for conservatives and honor his vows to repeal Obamacare, implement Representative Paul Ryan’s agenda, and stay true to his pro-life commitments." In the same article, Goldberg mentions that Romney is not a man of vision, instead he is a man of duty and purpose. Now, that is upsetting for most U.S. citizens because over time the President has become an office of vision and charisma, unlike what the founders intended the presidency to be, but that's not the point of this post. Am I waffling on my candidate? No. I haven't ever been that excited about Santorum, except for the way he handled the same-sex marriage issue at a college a while back; other than that, I haven't had a lot to say about him other than he is not a fiscal conservative. I have said that much. Check out the video below.

When asked about fiscal issues he says, "Go vote for Ron Paul." OK, I will. Now, it could be said maybe Romney would say the same thing, but I find it interesting that Santorum replied the way he did. Anyway, what is Santorum's fiscal record? Club for Growth writes that his economic record is above average, "But his record also contains several very weak spots, including his active support of wasteful spending earmarks, his penchant for trade protectionism, and his willingness to support large government expansions like the Medicare prescription drug bill and the 2005 Highway Bill. As president, Santorum would most likely lead the country in a pro-growth direction, but his record contains more than a few weak spots that make us question if he would resist political expediency when it comes to economic issues." 

I read this over at Lonely Conservative: 

One complaint is that Mr. Santorum’s claim of being the only truly small-government conservative among the three top GOP nomination contenders is undermined by his support of big-government spending while in the Senate — especially when it comes to the mile-long Pittsburgh tunnel project that was part of a deal with Mr. Brooks and his union.

In exchange for helping push through federal support for the project, Mr. Santorum won the endorsement of the state’s building and construction trade unions — including Mr. Brooks‘ 14,000-member carpenters union.

Even Sen. Arlen Specter, then a Republican from Pennsylvania, turned against the project when its overruns climbed to $450 million and then hit $528 million.

“We had a deal with Santorum,” said Mr. Brooks, whose Greater Pennsylvania Regional Council of Carpenters, along with other major building and construction trade unions, endorsed Mr. Santorum after the senator went to bat in Washington for construction of the tunnel under the Allegheny River. The tunnel’s only stop is at the two taxpayer-funded sports stadiums built with Mr. Santorum’s support.

“Very seldom are you going to have a union endorse a Republican,” said Mr. Brooks. “But the project created 4,000 jobs” — even if they were temporary — for workers in the construction and building trades.

Critics, including Mr. Specter, say the tunnel’s gargantuan costs far exceed its projected benefits to western Pennsylvania.

Read the rest here. 

Reading that story only confirmed my already made impression of the fiscal Santorum. He is a staunch conservative when it comes to social issues, but his fiscal philosophy is rotten, which doesn't make sense because good fiscal policies drive good social policies. If government is limited as it should be, then social programs social conservatives don't want funded will not be funded and there will be no "issue." 

I think my man Newt is out of the race, by that I mean he most likely cannot win the nomination; same goes for my man Paul, so I think the nomination race is most likely between Romney and Santorum and if that's true then my vote will be for Romney. I honestly think Romney can get votes from independent voters which help to get Obama out of office. Santorum? I don't think he can get independent votes because of his staunch social conservatism which will lead to four more years of Obama. 

Is Romney my ideal candidate? No he's not, so don't think I'm a Romney fan in any way. What do I want? I don't want four more years of Obama. 

I'll end the post with Goldberg's summary of Romney. 

"...Romney is not a man of vision. He is a man of duty and purpose. He was told to “fix” health care in ways Massachusetts would like. He was told to fix the 2002 Olympics. He was told to create Bain Capital. He did it all. The man does his assignments.

In this light, voting for Romney isn’t a betrayal, it’s a transaction. No, that’s not very exciting or reassuring for those who’d sooner see monkeys fly out their nethers than compromise again. But such a bargain may just be necessary before judgment day comes."

Paul Copan and Norman Bacrac debate: Is God a moral monster?

Paul Copan and Norman Bacrac debate on whether God is a moral monster or not.

Is God necessary for morality? Bill Craig Shelly Kagan debate

The format for the night was more conversational than a "go-for-the-win" debate. It's enjoyable and helpful nonetheless.

Quote of the week - Shelly Kagan on morality vs law

"But there is something else normative ethics should not be confused with: the law. Determining what people morally should do is not the same thing as determining what the law says they should do. For the law may permit some particular act, even though that act is immoral; and the law may forbid an act, even though that act is morally permissible, or even morally required.

Here, too, easy examples can bring out the point. In the American South, before the civil war, slavery was legal. But despite the fact that slavery was legally permitted, we would certainly want to insist that slavery was morally forbidden: it was immoral to treat enslaved people as they were treated — indeed, it was morally reprehensible — and the truth of this claim is not altered by the fact that such treatment was permitted by the law. Similarly, to take a more contemporary example, opponents of abortion think that abortion is typically (or perhaps even always) morally forbidden — despite the fact that current law generally permits it. And if the law ever changes, so as to prohibit most (or all) abortions, there will doubtless be many other people who nonetheless will think that abortions are still typically (or perhaps even always) morally permissible — despite the fact that the law forbids it. In short, what the law says is one thing; and what morality says may well be another."

- Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Westview Press: 1998), pp. 9-10 

See his conversational debate with Bill Craig here.

The horse named Euthyphro and how it's flogged to death

Reading on moral ontology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, I came across theological facts and noticed that the encyclopedia offered the Euthyphro dilemma as a kind of defeater for God giving us moral knowledge. Unfamiliar with the supposed dilemma? Here it goes (as given by SEP). 

"In this dialogue Euthyphro tries to explain to Socrates that piety is what the gods love. Socrates then asks Euthyphro whether the gods love the pious because they are good or whether the pious are good because the gods love them. To put the dilemma in terms relevant to the present context, consider the view that genocide is wrong because it is contrary to God's will. (The argument doesn't change if we talk about commandments or love instead of will.) We can ask of this view whether God forbids genocide because it is wrong, or whether it is wrong because God forbids it. In the latter case God's will appears to be arbitrary or at least not based on an appropriate moral reason. For believers who regard God as supremely moral, the latter possibility would be unacceptable. In the former case, however, God's will would be based on the wrongness of genocide, conceived as being separate from and logically prior to the concept of God's will. Hence, in this case the appeal to God's will does not provide an answer to the skeptic, but rather presupposes that we already have an answer. In sum, unless we are prepared to suppose that what God wills, loves, or commands has no moral basis, the attempt to base the possibility of moral knowledge on knowledge of God's will or love or commandments is, like Euthyphro's explanation of piety, viciously circular." 1

Perhaps this is why smart guys like Sam Harris actually bring up the dilemma to try and show the moral argument for God is an antiquated and weak argument even though it's actually neither of those things because (at least to my knowledge) the SEP doesn't even offer the answer to the dilemma. What is the answer? I'll let Greg Koukl and others explain. 

"A proper understanding of Christian teaching on God removes one problem, yet we still face another: What is "good"? How can we know goodness if we don't define it first? 

The way Abraham responded when he first learned of God's intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah gives us a clue to the answer:

Far be it from Thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous and the wicked are treated alike. Far be it from Thee! Shall not the Judge of all the earth deal justly? (Genesis 18:25)

Here's the question. How did Abraham know justice required that God not treat the wicked and the righteous alike? As of yet, no commandments had been handed down.

Abraham knew goodness not by prior definition or by some decree of God, but through moral intuition. He didn't need God to define justice (divine command). He knew it directly. His moral knowledge was built in.[13]

 

Even the atheist understands what moral terms mean. He doesn't need God in order to recognize morality. He needs God to make sense of what he recognizes. 

This is precisely why the moral argument for God's existence is such a good one. The awareness of morality leads to God much as the awareness of falling apples leads to gravity. Our moral intuitions recognize the effect, but what is the adequate cause? If God does not exist, then moral terms are actually incoherent and our moral intuitions are nonsense. 

Christians need not fear Plato on this score. When Euthyphro's dilemma is applied to Christianity, it mischaracterizes the Biblical view of God. Goodness is neither above God nor merely willed by Him. Instead, ethics are grounded in His holy character. Moral notions are not arbitrary and given to caprice. They are fixed and absolute, grounded in God's immutable nature. 

Further, no outside definition of piety is necessary because morality is known directly through the faculty of moral intuition. God's laws express His character and--if our moral intuitions are intact--we immediately recognize those Laws as good. 

This doesn't mean Christianity is true, only that it's is not handicapped by Plato's challenge to Euthyphro." 2

 

Bill Craig writes "...we don't need to refute either of the two horns of the dilemma because the dilemma is a false one: There's a third alternative, namely, God wills something because He is good...I mean God's own nature is the standard of goodness, and His commandments to us are expressions of His nature. In short, our moral duties are determined by the commands of a just and loving God." 3 

 

Glenn Peoples writes, "Yes God is good in the sense that God is loving, just and so on. But as Craig has noted on a number of occasions, God has no moral obligations and therefore cannot live up to any external standard. This has the implication that God is not morally good. God is good in the sense that he is loving, just, forgiving and so on, and we identify these things as good in the way that, say, hot soup on a cold day is good for us, or an apple is a good one rather than a rotten one. God’s good nature motivates God to command the things that he does, and this in turn gives rise to moral duty – rightness." 4 

 

I don't want to muddy the waters made here by the philosophers quoted, so I'll save my comments for another post on another day. 

 

Sources 

 

1. Moral epistemology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 

 

2. Euthyphro's Dilemma, Greg Koukl 

 

3. William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010), pg. 135  

 

4. Debate Review: William Lane Craig and Sam Harris, Glenn Peoples

moral facts or moral beliefs?

Glenn Peoples wrote an excellent post titled, "Do moral facts not require an explanation?" I highly recommend reading the post in its entirety. Here, I'm only posting one section on epistemological worry.

"If atheism is true, then we human beings evolved into what we are via a process that is now standardly described in textbooks on evolutionary biology, and crucially, they did so for no divinely appointed reason and with no creator’s plan involved. We developed as we did because this development was the path of least resistance. Changes occurred over the generations due to mutation, and some of those changes had the good luck to be more conducive to survival and reproduction, so those changes were kept, and on the process went. Now consider that while this process was going on, unguided, for millennia, there existed non-natural moral facts – facts that did not depend for their existence on any natural state of affairs whatsoever. While the most complex life on earth consisted of single celled organisms in a primordial slime puddle, these facts existed, and they continued to do so, unchanged, right through to the present day.

As a species, and as philosophers who think about ethics, we take ourselves to know some of the moral truths that are there – maybe even most of them. We have epistemic access to them. But supposing that the above scenario is correct, what are the chances that we should know any of those truths, let alone some or most of them?

Of course, atheists who reject the existence of moral facts have no problems discussing the origins of morality, since they are free to speak exclusively in terms of moral beliefs which are actually all false. In our developmental history our belief forming structures changed in ways that were beneficial to our forming beliefs beliefs that were useful for survival and reproduction, and we even formed sets of beliefs that we might call a “moral code,” but this has nothing to do with the truth of those beliefs. The beliefs were useful, and that is that. Their falsehood shouldn’t make us worried about holding them, as Nietzsche explained:

The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live—that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil [emphasis original].⁸

If moral facts are not explained in terms of anything in the natural world, then there is, it seems to me, no reason to suppose that we would just happen to evolve as a species in such a way that we would find ourselves knowing what those facts are. Obviously (or so it seems, again, to me) if God exists then as a personal, albeit non-natural being, he might choose to let humanity know that he is there, whether by some sort of intervening revelation, or even by causing human beings to exist in such a way that when they function properly they are aware of his existence. But non-natural impersonal things like UMFs (unexplained moral facts) do not have this sort of ability simply because they are not personal.

If UMFs exist then, we have no reason to believe in them, or at least no reason to think that we are likely to know what they are."

You can read the whole post by clicking here.

Quote of the week - Immanuel Kant on the metaphysics of morality

"A metaphysics of morals is therefore indispensably necessary, not merely because of a motive to speculation — for investigating the source of the practical basic principles that lie a priori in our reason — but also because morals themselves remain subject to all sorts of corruption as long as we are without that clue and supreme norm by which to appraise them correctly..."

- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)

Moral philosophy affects everyone

As March begins, I was thinking of a possible theme for the month, you know, a focus for all of the posts. Technology? No, I started another blog for that (haven't written the first post yet...fail). Cosmology? No. I find cosmology very interesting. I read the articles and books, yet I do find myself stuttering and rambling on when I talk about it with others mostly because I'm not a cosmologist so I'm not inclined to include the depths of cosmological arguments in my conversations with people; I'm just not very good at presenting them. Origin of life? Nope, mostly for the same reason I don't plunge into cosmology. Do I understand the arguments? Of definitely, but it's not a serious interest. Moral philosophy? Bingo! That's the one!

Why moral philosophy? Because it affects everyone. You can easily say, "Uh, blogger dude, the intricacies of the universe affect everyone too man." Good point, but not everyone cares. Sad to say, but it's true. The same with the origin of life. The ordinary person most likely doesn't care who his ultimate ancestor is, much less if it is an ancestor common with other species; he just cares about getting his morning coffee, reading the headlines (or watching morning cartoons), and heading off to work. You could say that same ordinary person who doesn't care about science probably doesn't care about morality either. Maybe. Or does he care? I say he does. Moral philosophy affects everyone: our language, our "oughtness," our actions are all rooted in some moral philosophy - I say an objective one.

Everyone believes in objective morality. That's a bold claim isn't it? Relativist moralists are actually living moral objectivists (is that a word?) without knowing it. Almost every moral relativist claims objective moral rules when he or she is affected by moral relativism, e.g. LGBT rights, black rights, women's rights, the list goes on. Why on moral relativism should you treat those who are a different race from your own with equal value and dignity? Or women? Why given moral relativism should they deserver to be treated with equal value and dignity? Why should we help the poor, the sick, and those "weaker" than ourselves if morality is relative? I think questions like those get to the heart of everyone, which is just one reason moral philosophy affects everyone. 

We encounter moral philosophy everyday; not just in our interactions with other persons, but we also encounter moral situations when we are alone, when no one is watching or listening. You're alone in your room surfing the interweb and you become a little curious when you see a headline that reads, "J-Lo showing some leg at the red carpet." You check it out thinking there's nothing wrong with that. Wrong? See? Moral philosophy. What makes it "wrong" or "right"? Or, you're alone on the street and see someone in the process of a mugging. The mugger and the victim didn't see you scurry behind the corner of the building, nor did anyone else. What do you do? What is the "wrong" and "right" thing to do? Another situation a little closer to home for those of you who don't live in areas with high crime rates: you're walking along the sidewalk (or driving down the road) and see your best friend's wife hugging and kissing on another guy. What is the "right" and "wrong" thing to do in that situation? They didn't see you, so you can easily avoid the situation. 

Moral philosophy affects everyone from the obvious to the not so obvious situations. Every day of your life some kind of moral situation. My goal for March is to post a lot of "stuff" on moral philosophy. I hope you enjoy the posts and learn something from them.