The following is a brief, meandering response to ‘Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins’, an atheist who keeps abreast of analytic philosophy of religion and profitable to follow on Twitter to get a feel for ‘the other side’, so to speak. He gave me access to a Google Doc, which is a brief summary of his views regarding his criticisms of modified divine command theory.
MODIFIED DIVINE COMMAND THEORY
Truths about moral values are informatively identical with facts about God’s nature.
Moral truths about obligation are informatively identical with facts about God’s will or commands.
Thus, if God does not exist, then[...]
[...]nothing is morally good nor bad because there is no objective standard of goodness.
[...]there are no morally right nor wrong acts as there are no divine commands.
THE LOGICAL SPACE OF REASONS
When we characterize the property of being a wrong act, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons. Moral properties are abstract and irreducibly normative.
THE LOGICAL SPACE OF CAUSES
But when we characterize the property of being forbidden by God we are placing it in the logical space of causes. What God has willed or commanded would be concrete and non-normative properties.
ETHICAL NON-NATURALISM
These two kinds of properties could not be informatively identical because they are in different, non-overlapping categories. For the same reasons rivers cannot be identical with sonnets, moral properties cannot be identical with psychological, behavioral, or otherwise causal properties.
I think the dichotomy between reasons and causes is a good one, but I don’t think it’s doing the work it needs to do (and I think that ‘causes’ might be two unwieldy of a concept to use in this context: are all grounding relations causal relations?). I agree that ‘being a wrong act’ is in the logical space of reasons from the standpoint of Normative Ethics. That is, an action’s being wrong can serve as a reason for why I ought not to do it. But it’s a completely separate question to ask what ‘grounds’ moral truths about obligations. Grounding considerations may never figure into the normative reasons for why I ought to do something, or why I think I ought to do something, just as considerations of photons may never figure into the reasons I have for having you point your flashlight in a particular direction. Why, you ask? Because I need to see where I’m going, I answer. All this assumes light is going to help me see where I’m going. But I knew this before I found out about photons. Before I knew that photons cause/constitute/ground light, or light’s appearance, or light’s effects in terms of increased visibility, I knew that having your flashlight pointed in the desired direction helped me see where I was going. The ‘reason’ had nothing to do with photons. These two logical spaces would exclude each other only if they operated at the same level of description. But they don’t.
Here’s another way to say it. The Morning Star has the property ‘rising in the morning but not the evening’ and ‘being Phosphorus in Greek Mythology’. Venus has the property of ‘rising in the morning and also in the evening.’ and ‘not being Phosphorus in Greek Mythology’. The former is in the logical space of Mythology and the latter is in the logical space of Astronomy. But these two logical spaces don’t exclude each other because they operate on two varying, non-exclusionary levels of description. Not only that, but unbeknownst to the ancient Greeks, the astronomical object later discovered to be Venus, an object that’s also Hesperus, ‘grounds’ the existence of their phenomenal experience of Phosphorus, the means by which they conceived of the mythological being.
In any case of ‘informative identity’ I can think of, the two things being identified are going to have different properties relative to a level of description. Clark Kent is a terrible investigative journalist; Superman is a Herculean kryptonian. Bruce Wayne is a narcissistic, billionaire playboy; Batman is a martial artist who is also a criminal detective. Phosphorus is the son of Astraeus and Eos (per Hesiod); Venus is the third planet from the Sun. The Good is a concrete particular, a Person that falls under the description ‘perfectly good being’; the predicate ‘is good’ (in the moral sense) is ascribed to persons that are appropriately approximated to virtues The Good has to a maximal degree; the normative reason ‘because it is good’ can be used by moral agents as a normative reason for thinking a particular moral proposition is true or false, or for thinking that a particular morally relevant state of affairs is objectively good, or for thinking that undertaking a morally relevant course of action is morally justified. All these logical spaces (metaphysical, semantic, and normative) pick out varying, non-exclusionary levels of description of some informatively identical object. They are non-exclusionary because the semantic and the normative spaces (per the theory) are grounded by the metaphysical space. It being a case of ‘informative identity’ means moral agents can use the semantic and the normative spaces without even knowing about the metaphysical space, just like I can use ‘illumination-speech-acts’ without knowing about the ‘physics-speech-acts’ regarding photons. Informative identity always uses two, non-exclusionary ‘logical spaces’ at different levels of description.
THE NATURALISTIC FALLACY
When we are characterizing a moral truth we are giving neither a causal nor empirical description of it. Instead, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons i.e. justifying how one thinks or acts by reason. The idea that moral facts can be analyzed without remainder, even in principle, into non-normative facts such as psychological, behavioral, or otherwise causal facts is a radical mistake. Any attempt to reduce the logical space of reasons to the logical space of causes will commit the naturalistic fallacy.
The naturalistic fallacy (per Moore) is a fallacy that’s guilty of identifying a non-natural property with a natural one. Naturalness and normativity are two different things. Ethical non-naturalism is a position that can be held by Robert Adams or an atheist like Eric Wielenberg or Michael Heumer. Adams does not identify a non-natural property with a natural one. God is non-natural! An Alstonian particularist takes the structure of Plato’s metaethics and substitutes a Person in for the Form of The Good, making the Person The Good. All of this is axiological through and through. Interestingly, Plato’s Form of The Good had causal powers! The non-normative facts listed above are only non-normative when they refer to finite, imperfect moral agents or states in those agents, not when they refer to an infinite, perfect being, The Good Himself. The target of this criticism is wide of the mark. Moreover, it’s false to say that the two noted, non-exclusionary sets of descriptions can be ‘reduced’ to each other. They can’t. That’s not the nature of their non-exclusionary status. Levels of description are semantically irreducible, even if metaphysically reducible. How moral agents unpack what they mean by the predicate ‘is good’, or what moral agents do when they morally deliberate about courses of action they deem themselves to have morally sufficient reasons to undertake, may make no reference to, or may be completely oblivious of, what these levels of description are informatively identical to, metaphysically speaking. Light is informatively identical to photons; what I mean by ‘light’ may be semantically irreducible to what I would mean by ‘photons’ even if perhaps I don’t know that photons exist, or even if I’d confess (after I found out that they exist) that what the physicists mean by ‘photon’ isn’t what I mean by ‘light’. Frege’s distinction between sense and reference is indispensable to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment