Swinburne, God, and Morality

In chapter 8, What Difference Does God Make to Morality?, in the book Is Goodness Without God Good Enough? (eds. Nathan L. King and Robert K. Garcia), Richard Swinburne says the following:

Against William Craig , I shall argue that the existence and actions of God make no difference to the fact that there are moral truths

This all hinges on what Swinburne means by 'make no difference'. My view is God's existence and actions make a huge difference to the fact that there are moral truths. Without God (who is The Good), there would be no true moral propositions about goodness; without God's divine commands, there would be no true moral propositions about rightness. Rather than flesh all of that out here, I'll wait until Swinburne makes his case.

Swinburne proceeds to discuss the nature of actions, the idea that some moral judgments are true or false, and the idea that the moral properties of actions supervene on non-moral properties. 

But the key idea Swinburne has is this: 

So what makes it the case that promise keeping and truth telling (possibly subject to some qualifications about circumstances) are obligatory, and killing someone (except perhaps an enemy combatant in a just war or a crim­ inal justly sentenced to death) is morally wrong? My answer is simple-the very nature of the act itself. An act of killing being an act of killing (not in specified circumstances) entails that it is morally wrong. Just as a surface could not be blue without having something in common with a surface that is green, which something is being colored, so promise keeping and truth telling could not be what they are without having in common that they are (possibly subject to qualifications) both morally obligatory.

Thus, the nature of certain actions (I'll call it 'murder' rather than 'killing') entails that such actions are morally wrong. Notice that Swinburne asks what makes it the case that certain actions are obligatory or morally wrong. This sounds like he is asking for a ground here. And if he is, he is satisfied with that ground being the nature of the act itself. The analogy to surfaces is supposed to explicate this. Blue surfaces have something in common with green surfaces by virtue of the fact that both surfaces are colored surfaces. And so, telling the truth and keeping your promises have something in common by virtue of the fact that they're both morally obligatory.

This doesn't help me very much. I'm not asking how it is that two instances of a class have something in common. I'm asking for an explication of the ground. I'm asking how the 'nature of the act itself' grounds that such an act is morally wrong or obligatory. Grounds are something that exists (facts, states of affairs, events, things, etc.) that explains whatever is being grounded. Is Swinburne reifying natures since he appeals to the nature of actions as what makes it the case that such an action is morally wrong or obligatory? I'm not sure Swinburne wants to do that. 

Perhaps Swinburne is arguing that green surfaces are green by virtue of the fact that such surfaces are colored. A green surface could not be green if 'green' was not an instance of 'being colored'. The analogy seems to imply that we need to quantify over existing things here. Some existing thing, a colored thing, needs to ground another existing thing, a green thing. If that's the way to understand the analogy, perhaps I'm to understand existing murder-type-things as being grounded by existing morally-wrong-things or existing obligatory-things. But what else could these things be but so many abstracta? Does Swinburne really want to ontologically commit himself to abstract objects such as the property 'being morally wrong' or the property 'being obligatory'? 

Perhaps Swinburne could be an anti-realist about such natures or properties. But if he is, I can't make sense of the grounding-relation. The grounding-relation is a relation that involves, at least, the existence of whatever it is that's doing the grounding. 

Swinburne then goes into how we "acquire a sense of morality" involving issues of "reflective equilibrium", which gets into moral epistemology. Most of Swinburne's thoughts here are very plausible. 

Swinburne's view is made more explicit by his peculiar response to the Euthyphro Dilemma: 

Put in theistic terms (and phrased simply in terms of com­mand and obligation), the Euthyphro dilemma becomes the following: Is that which is obligatory commanded by God because it is obligatory, or is it oblig­atory because it is commanded by God? 

Kant gave the simple answer of taking the first horn of this dilemma; 

other thinkers in the Christian tradition (perhaps William of Ockham, and certainly Gabriel Biet) have taken the second horn; 

but the view that I am putting forward takes the first horn for some obligations and the second for others. 

In my view we ought not to rape or to break a just promise (that is, one that we had the right to make), whether or not there is a God; here God can only command us to do what is our duty anyway. 

But for the latter, only a divine command would make it obligatory to join in commu­nal worship on Sundays rather than Tuesdays . That there are very general prin­ciples of morality, including not only the principle of the obligation to please benefactors but other principles as well, was recognized by both Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus . 

Aquinas held that "the first principles of natural law are altogether unalterable." He does not tell us much in the Summa Theologiae about which these are , but he does write that they are principles too general to be mentioned in the Ten Commandments, principles such as that no one ought to do evil to anyone, which he says are "inscribed in natural reason as self-ev­ident." 

Scotus tells us that the only moral obligations from which God could not dispense us are the duties to love and reverence God himself, which Scotus sees as constituted by the first three of the Ten Commandments . 

So both writ­ers hold-and, I have claimed, are right to hold-that there are necessary moral truths independent of the will of God, but that the will of God makes a very great difference to what are the contingent moral truths.

That's it. End quote. I'm not saying that Swinburne doesn't go on to flesh out really interesting consequences of his position: that there are necessary moral truths independent of God's will, consequences in moral epistemology and consequences having to do with the difference God's existence and commands make to certain goods and/or contingent moral facts, or making us aware in certain ways of the relevant necessary moral truths. But there isn't any argument for the thesis that necessary moral truths are independent of God's will. He quotes Aquinas and Scotus. But nothing in those quotations comes close to providing an argument for how the necessary moral truths are independent of God's will. They provide good reason for how the moral truths are necessary, which is close in meaning to unalterable. But that's all that can I see. 

The key premise here (or perhaps intuition) is that Swinburne believes that rape, for example, would still be wrong whether or not God exists. God's commands here would involve commands for us to do something that is already our duty even if no commands were given. And it's already our duty to not rape whether or not God exists because (and here is the intuition again) the moral truth (one ought not to rape) is necessary. 

The problem here for Swinburne's view is that he doesn't provide a reason to accept the thesis that necessary truths can't be, or don't need to be, ground. Of course, it might depend on the kind of alethic necessity for a particular philosopher. But in this particular case it seems evident that Swinburne needs to provide a positive reason for thinking that the mere necessity of moral truths is sufficient basis for the thesis that necessary moral truths are not grounded in God. 

Craig makes a criticism along these lines: 

The assumption here seems to be that necessary truths cannot stand to one another in relations of explanatory priority. Not only do I see no reason to think that assumption true, but it strikes me as obviously false. 

For exam­le, "States of consciousness exist" is necessarily true, since "God exists" is necessarily true. That is to say, the fact that a personal, metaphysically necessary being like God exists explains why it is necessarily true that states of consciousness exist. 

To give a nontheological example, the axioms of Peano arithmetic are explanatorily prior to "2 + 2 = 4" , as are the axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory to the theorems thereof. 

In metaphysics, "No event precedes itself' is necessarily true because it is necessarily true that "Tempo­ ral becoming is an objective and essential feature of time." 

I should regard as utterly implausible the suggestion that the relation of explanatory priority in such cases is symmetric. But if necessary truths can stand to one another in asymmetric relations of explanatory priority, then there is no objection so far to holding that moral values exist because God exists.

This seems to me very plausible. And since Swinburne doesn't press the dialectic beyond the idea that moral truths are necessary, I don't have a good reason to go along with him here. 

A Word on Models and Modal Knowledge

I was randomly reading Warranted Christian Belief (Plantinga) and came across his discussion of models in Chapter 6. The context was his presentation of the Aquinas/Calvin and the extended Aquinas/Calvin model. Cool and all, but not what caught my attention. There's, of course, Model Theory. But Plantinga proposes a use of the term 'model' that's more concrete than that. It won't have to do with how the natural numbers are a model for some 'consistent first-order theory'. Plantinga says that the 'model' will be a proposition. It can also be a state of affairs. It'll be a possible proposition, sure. And then Plantinga gives us a condition: if that possible proposition happens to be true, then so is what Plantinga calls 'the target proposition'. In this case, that proposition is, respectively, either theism is true or Christian theism is true. So, we have a pair of conditionals. Namely, if something like the proposed models are true, then so are the pair of target propositions. And both of the conditionals are true because the consequents of both the conditions can't be false, per what's stipulated about the implications. The first thing Plantinga tries to do is more modest than demonstrating the models to be true. He wants to show they're epistemically possible. This modality is consistent with what we know. And what we know is 'what all (or most) of the participants in the discussion agree on'. It is stronger than broad logical possibility (I think Plantinga identifies this modality with metaphysical possibility, the possibility of being metaphysically instantiated). But what's interesting is that a proposition can be epistemically possible, but not metaphysically possible. As an example, Plantinga considers existentialism: the existence of propositions ontologically depend on the existence of the singular objects of which they are about. In other words, the existence of the proposition Socrates is Greek ontologically depend on the existence of Socrates. Plantinga explains that he believes, but doesn't know, that existentialism is false. The belief in the falsity of existentialism is consistent with what we know. It is therefore epistemically possible. But curiously, belief in the truth of existentialism is also consistent with what we know. Thus, the proposition, along with its denial, is both epistemically possible, even though only one or the other is necessarily true, which means that one or the other is necessarily false. Therefore, a proposition can be epistemically possible, but metaphysically impossible. 

That's all for now. I just thought it was interesting, perhaps another way to get at modal knowledge. Off to bed! 

Cosmic Skeptic on Free Will, Determinism, and Compatibilism

A Critique of Alex Malpass and Wes Morriston: The Case for a Potential Infinite being a Symmetry Breaker between a Beginningless Past and an Endless Future

Alex Malpass

Wes Morriston and Alex Malpass (MM) argue that there is no symmetry-breaker (SB) between a beginningless past and an endless future. They consider proposed SBs (potential infinity, non-actual potentiality, and non-existence) and demonstrate their inadequacy. 

Wes Morriston

There is no SB with the endless future being a potential infinite. If the future is endless, then the series of events that will be is an actual infinite. There is no SB with the future being non-actual because the series of potentialities that will be actual is actually infinite. There is no SB with the future being non-existent because the beginningless past is also composed of non-existent events. The endless future is composed of a series of events that will exist. 

A Commentary on Stephen Puryear's response to Andrew Loke and Travis Dumsday

Puryear's response essay is called Finitism, Divisibility, and the Beginning of the Universe: Replies to Loke and Dumsday. 

In this commentary, we'll see if Puryear's response to Loke and Dumsday holds up, but I also want to see if what I said in the previous blog is still defensible. 

Puryear says:

My argument has elicited replies from Andrew Ter Ern Loke [2016] and Travis Dumsday [2016]. Here I address the three basic objections to emerge from those replies.

The first two, due to Dumsday, concern the distinction between infinite magnitudes and infinite multitudes, and the distinction between extensively and intensively infinite progressions. 

The third objection, which both Loke and Dumsday urge in one form or another, concerns the possibility that time might be continuous yet naturally divide into smallest parts of finite duration.

That third objection I'm especially interested in. But I am very interested in the first two objections as well. Let's dive in. 

Commentary on Stephen Puryear's "Finitism and The Beginning of the Universe"

It's always exciting to read new criticisms of William Lane Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument. In this blog, I'll be providing commentary on Stephen Puryear's "Finitism and The Beginning of the Universe". Here is the abstract: 

Many philosophers have argued that the past must be finite in duration because otherwise reaching the present moment would have involved something impossible, namely, the sequential occurrence of an actual infinity of events. In reply, some philosophers have objected that there can be nothing amiss in such an occurrence, since actually infinite sequences are ‘traversed’ all the time in nature, for example, whenever an object moves from one location in space to another. This essay focuses on one of the two available replies to this objection, namely, the claim that actual infinities are not traversed in nature because space, time and other continuous wholes divide into parts only in so far as we divide them in thought, and thus divide into only a finite number of parts. I grant that this reply succeeds in blunting the antifinitist objection, but argue that it also subverts the very argument against an eternal past it was intended to save.

Series: Part 11 of 11 - Wrapping Everything Up

I was going to go back through the audio conversation I had with Alex Malpass. But I think what I've said in the previous blogs is sufficient for now. I may just end up repeating myself. Suffice it to say, I think there are good reasons for rejecting the metaphysical possibility of an actual infinite, that the potential infinitude of the future doesn't imply its actual infinitude, that tense renders a beginningless past asymmetrical with an endless future, and so on. I'll be adding onto this series with future blogs as I get more time to research the issues here with more exactitude. Thanks!