It Is Confusion Print
Culture and Politics - Sex and Culture
Written by Douglas Wilson   
Wednesday, 28 November 2012 07:24

Comes now word that Germany has (perfectly legal) barnyard brothels, where pimps get to rent out the livestock for sexual purposes.

We are not surprised to find that Scripture prohibits this kind of thing. Adam searched for a helper suitable to him among the animals, and there were none. God established His image in male and female together (Gen. 1:27), and thus we see that a particular set of perversions (such as homosexuality and bestiality) are attempts to strike at this image of God. God inhabits eternity, and sinful man cannot reach Him, as much as he would like to. But he thinks he can reach the image of God that He established down here -- and so these perversions are actually sexual iconoclasm.

When the images are graven images and hence unlawful (Ex. 20:4), iconoclasm can certainly be a good and godly thing (2 Kings 23:24). But when the images and icons were fashioned by God Himself from the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7) from the rib of the man (Gen. 2:21-22), and after that, fashioned by God in the womb of every mother (Ps. 139:15-16), to attack that image is impudence and rebellion.

So it is bad then. But what kind of bad?

"Neither shalt thou lie with any beast to defile thyself therewith: neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion" (Lev. 18:23).

The Old Testament, famously, abominates a number of things. But the sin of bestiality here is not just described as an abomination. It is described as confusion. One other sin is decribed that way -- the sin of having sex with your daughter-in-law (Lev. 20:12).

It is tebel, confusion. It is sinful, of course, and an abomination, of course. But it is also confusion. It is dislocated and out of joint. It is a muddled monstrosity. It is demented.

So in what might appear to be a lurch, I would like to lay the responsibilty at the feet of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. When this sort of thing happens to a nation, and that nation's politicians, statesmen, leaders, poets, seers, editorialists, song-writers, bloggers, and magazine publishers don't feel they have any basis for coming back and saying, "No, of course not," when they don't think they have any place to stand in order to say, "Thou shalt not," it is time to look upstream and blame their philosophers.

Hume pretended to an utter skepticism, and Kant pretended to have fixed that problem, but without actual reference to the unknowable "noumenal" realm, things as they actually are, but which is forever closed off to us. The Almighty God had somehow abandoned us to live inside our own heads (an unhealthy place to be, however phenomenal it feels). We have just now begun to realize just how far our leaky little boat of intellectual sophistication has drifted. He who says A must say B, but more than this, he who cannot say A must eventually say B, whether he wants to or not.

I will go out on a limb. Unless we get back to Thomas Reid's common sense realism, or something very much like it, taking care to ensure that our philosophy is grounded explicitly on God's revelation to us in Christ, we will continue to be hosed. Speaking of iconoclasm, all the statues of the big boys need to go over -- Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, the lot. Why? It is confusion.

All our difficulties arise from the fact that we don't believe we have any authoritative basis for saying this, and not that. We have let all the boundaries go blurry in our sham pretence of epistemic humilty -- and at the end of the process we are forced to act like we don't know the difference between a woman and a heifer.

You might object and say that I am acting like everyone in Germany is going to these places. No, not at all. But I am saying that a tiny handful is doing this, and that the rest of the civilized world has nothing whatever to say to them. We are speechless. Schrodinger's cat has our tongue. Please, no angry comments saying that I don't understand quantum theory. It is a metaphor.

Relativism is not just a thought experiment any more. The internal core of the West is almost completely rotted out. I would say to the solons of dithering relativism that it is time for them to have the courage of their convictions, but that would be oxymoronic, wouldn't it?


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Dale Courtney  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 8:18 am
Germans are trying to outlaw it based on a PETA "cruelty to animals" standard.
Phil Jones  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 8:19 am
The whole thing so sickens my soul I cannot say more. Perhaps that's one reason for silence. The other could be that this sort of thing does not demand words but stones.
David Smith  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 8:57 am
Beyond the beyond! "O God, the pride of man, broken in the dust again!"
Arwen B.  - Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant!  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:06 am
I'd be more outraged if this weren't so totally predictable. It's only a matter of time before the pomo-europhiles start these things in the US. They'll probably start by introducing a bestialist as a character on a sitcom.

Welcome to the last days of Rome.
Jonathan  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:21 am
When I was a kid I took a philosophy of ethics and morality class, and in one paper I logically refuted the reality of Kant's version of the noumenal realm. The paper was less than 1.5 pages long. My professor (a Randian-lite) agreed that I had successfully refuted it. It is not a difficult worldview to dismiss.
Eric the Red  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 9:40 am
It's a huge leap from "I don't agree with your standard" to "I have no standard at all." Yet that is essentially what you are claiming here, that the only options are the Bible or nothing. And that is a false alternative.
Paul  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 11:00 am
What we are witnessing is the failure of your alleged standard.
David Stewart  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 11:09 am
Eric,

Doug is not saying that if you do not hold to his standard of what the Bible teaches, that you have no standard. He is arguing that the Christian worldview is the only one which can provide a philosophically defensible basis for such things as morality.

It is just his point that most non-Christians would join the church in condemning bestiality that he is alluding to. Do these other groups have a cogent reason for opposing bestiality? The questions to follow would include:
1. How do you know there is such a thing as an objective ethical standard?
2. Is ethics subjective, is it popularly determined, it is conventional?
3. If there are ethical standards, how do we come to know them? They are not material, and they are clearly not ingrained or genetic or physical characteristics, since there are far too many counter-examples available. Just ask the horsey at the "heavy" petting zoo!

That is his point, the same point he made in his Collision movie. We know you don't agree, but let's at least lay out the sides correctly.
Eric the Red  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 2:24 pm
David, just for starters, I completely disagree that Christian ethics are any more objective than any other kind of ethics. Your basis for claiming objectivity is the entirely circular contention that it's in a book you know to be true, and so therefore it's true. There is a name for such reasoning, and "objective" isn't it.

That said, here are the answers to your questions:

1. I know there is an objective ethical standard the same way I know that the laws of physics are in full force and effect: They work in practice. We see the results of ethical behavior, and we see the results of unethical behavior, and there is little doubt as to which produces a happier and healthier society.

2. See above. If you want to know if a particular act is ethical, the starting point is to ask yourself "What would happen if everybody did that?"

3. See above.

You are simply making this more complicated than it really is, and if your world view can only survive by overly-complicating things, then that's a pretty good comment on its validity.
Michael Bull  - Because we are sinners  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 2:48 pm
Eric

Western culture, especially Europe, is discovering that adultery and homosexuality do not work in practice. They are culturally unsustainable.

Apparently they haven't made the logical connection you have between physics and morality. They failed to ask "What would happen if everybody did that?"

A tree is known by its fruits. If your pragmatic standard is so commonsense, why is it uncommon in practice? Because we are sinners, and sin is irrational. And your standard, like the law of Moses, is good but entirely powerless to affect any change in actual behavior.
John McNeely  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 2:58 pm
Eric,
I didn't know you were against homosexuality. Based on this comment, "If you want to know if a particular act is ethical, the starting point is to ask yourself "What would happen if everybody did that?"" If everyone engaged in exclusive homosexuality there would be no "healthy society". It would cease to exist. Perhaps a society should adopt a an ethic of murdering all other societies? Based on the idea of survival of the fittest. It is debatable whether or not the conquering society would be happy and healthy. What makes the majority of one group of people happy is not always the same as what makes another group happy. If the only standard is what behaviors serve the purpose of creating a "happy and healthy" society there is no standard. If there is no transcendent standard beyond the majority's happiness and health why is happiness and health of the majority anymore relevant or binding than the individuals happiness? By what standard do you make that judgment?
Eric the Red  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 4:46 pm
Michael, whether objective ethics exist, and whether people actually practice ethical behavior, are two different questions. Nevertheless, my point remains that some types of behavior are more likely to produce a happy, healthy society than others. Most people (including me) eat stuff they shouldn't but that doesn't mean that there's no such thing as objective nutrition.

John, you've equivocated by giving my words a slightly different meaning than what I intended. You are right that if everyone practiced exclusive homosexuality, the human race would die out. But, the point of ethics is to apply broad principles across a wide spectrum of behavior, and not to make rules based on outliers. The ethical principle that applies is that people should practice sexual behavior in a way that is honest, responsible, and respectful of other people who will be affected; it has nothing to do with whether a particular man is attracted to women or to other men. A man who has spent the past 20 years in a stable relationship with another man is far more ethical (and far more socially beneficial) than a heterosexual man who has six children by six different women that he's not supporting, all of whom are on welfare.

And that is the reason a society with an ethic of murdering other societies is an ethical failure as well: In the first place, they are taking the risk that no other society will ever be strong enough to do the same to them, and there is no historical precedent that I am aware of for a single society always and in perpetuity being at the top of the food chain. In the second place, even if they could win that bet, violence spills over very quickly and tends to become intra-society; how long do you think it would be before they started killing each other?
David Stewart  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 5:44 pm
Eric,

Only someone confused about this topic would actually try to draw an analogy between the study of the natural world and its cause and effect relationships, on the one hand, and the issue of ethics on the other. One is material, and the other immaterial. One is approached through empirical scientific inquiry, and the other is philosophical and religious. Your comparison is apples and oranges, unless you are suggesting that behavior is purely determined by genetics, in which case there is no ethics, there is simply preprogrammed behavior that is not morally relevant.

When you say "They work in practice", you are just playing to your own crowd. You obviously have an end in mind you have already chosen, or else you couldn't appeal to some vague, overly generalized mechanism of "working" by which ethics produce the results you feel they should. So ethics "works" to that end. I'm asking you if there is an end at all? How do you know? Or are you resorting to a naturalistic fallacy, where we assume that the way things happen to be is how they should be? I could not have gotten away with this kind of reasoning from my atheistic freshman philosophy professor for crying out loud.

Happier society? What in the world are you talking about? By whose measurement? The serial killer and rapist are quite happy, and that's why they do what they do. It "works" for them. To answer that we couldn't have a functional society with these miscreants walking around is irrelevant to whether right and wrong exist, and how we know them. Okay, I'll bite - who says we need to work toward society? I think as a Christian I have an answer to that. I do not believe you have one, based on your posts.

"What would happen if everyone did that?" - Hey, who says we should care? You continue, over and over again, to assume purpose, to assume some basic moral laws, to assume that people should work together, to play fair, to be nice, to assume peace and non-violence are to be desired. If you want to have a philosophical discussion on this, you cannot assume those things. There are many people who did not live their lives that way. Who are you to say they are wrong? Just because you don't approve of what they did, so what? Who are you?

If you don't want to even try to answer some of the difficult questions, I understand. In the course of my life and your life, we don't start each day by first proving to ourselves that the carpet under our toes is actually outside our mind, and not a figment of our imagination, and then work from there for each encounter. Philosophy is hard work, and most of us do not do it as well as would be helpful for our discussions and disagreements. But there is a difference between embracing a cogent simplicity, and a kind of naive simpliciter. I believe the latter is what you are dishing up.
Eric the Red  Wednesday, November 28, 2012 7:32 pm
David, I will be happy to answer any question, difficult or otherwise, so long as you don't then respond by either moving the goalposts or changing the subject, which is mostly what you've done.

If you honestly don't understand that happiness is preferable to misery and pleasure is preferable to pain, then we have nothing to talk about. However, the fact that you may not understand that happiness is preferable to misery doesn't mean that nobody else understands it either. In fact, most people understand it quite well. They also understand that living in civil society is makes it more likely that more people will live in relative happiness, and that living in civil society requires encouraging some types of behavior and discouraging others.

And candidly, the type of argumentation you're making would be obviously ludicrous, even to you, in any other context at all. "By what objective measurement is it preferable to be healthy rather than sick? Who are you to tell the sick that their condition is less desirable than the condition of someone who is healthy? Some hypochondriacs actually enjoy being sick; aren't their feelings entitled to consideration as well?" Those are precisely the arguments you're making, only applied to physical health rather than ethics, and in that context you wouldn't buy them either. Anyone who honestly doesn't get that health is preferable to sickness, and that means that doing what one can to maintain one's health is a positive thing, would simply be dismissed as a lunatic and not paid attention to. Well, David, those lunatic arguments don't get any better simply because you're making them in the context of ethics.

You are right that there are rapists and serial killers who choose not to be ethical, just as there are hypochondriacs who enjoy being sick, but are you seriously suggesting that they are the appropriate yardstick? A serial killer essentially has the ethic of a mosquito -- I'll suck your blood if I can -- and there is no real point to trying to reason with a mosquito; you simply swat it and that's that. True, some serial killers get away with it (and will, under either your system or my system), just as some mosquitoes succeed in sucking my blood before flying off unharmed. But that's not a commentary on whether ethics exist; it's the recognition that individuals and societies have the right to defend themselves against those who choose not to be ethical.
David Stewart  Thursday, November 29, 2012 4:04 am
Eric,

Explain to us why it is wrong to have the ethics of a mosquito. That's all I am asking. It is the most simple question, and your worldview cannot provide an answer! You just make comments that assume the very thing you are being asked to prove. You make appeals to societies having rights to defend themselves. Where did these rights come from again? The evolutionary father/mother gender neutral blob that birthed us?

Christians have an answer to all of this, one which can be stated in Sunday school simplicity, but one which philosophically answers that question.

Oh, and Eric, your ontological confusion just continues. Again. Sickness is not analogous to morality. That is a fallacious analogy, one of many you have used. Being healthy may be "positive" in terms of one person's enjoyment, but that does not provide the basis for saying that we all have a moral obligation to be healthy. What about the Munchausen patient? Or better yet, the Munchausen by proxy patient? They enjoy being sick, and making others sick.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 12:17 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
It's a huge leap from "I don't agree with your standard" to "I have no standard at all." Yet that is essentially what you are claiming here, that the only options are the Bible or nothing. And that is a false alternative.

Eric's is an incorrect summary. Wilson was contrasting a revealed authoritative moral standard (from the Creator) with relativistic attempts at an authoritative moral standard. Eric the Red appears to have conceded Wilson's argument here because Eric avoids offering yet another relativistic moral standard, but instead tries to portray his own moral system as an objective one. Let's see if that can stand scrutiny. Is it really objective? And does it carry any prescriptive authority whatever?
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 12:46 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
I completely disagree that Christian ethics are any more objective than any other kind of ethics. Your basis for claiming objectivity is the entirely circular contention that it's in a book you know to be true, and so therefore it's true. There is a name for such reasoning, and "objective" isn't it.

This is a cheap, but common, mischaracterization of Christian epistemology. Why would a Christian feel it necessary to argue that "the Bible is true, so therefore it is true"? The Bible's truth is axiomatic, there is no need to derive it again as a conclusion. That would be redundant. I might as well charge Eric the Red of arguing that "A=A is true, so therefore A=A is true" regardless of whether he ever attempted such a useless circular argument. If Eric thinks he is taking a shot at our epistemology with this approach, he is shooting blanks.
The Bible's truth is a starting premise, not a conclusion. Eric may disbelieve the premise, but that would be equivalent to disbelieving that A=A. Such disbelief would not suddenly require us to derive A=A. It is not even possible to derive A=A without presupposing it the whole time. We might demonstrate the logical consequences of not presupposing A=A, but that's not a derivation of the axiom itself. If we could derive the foundational truths of Scripture, then they wouldn't have needed to be revealed.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 1:13 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
1. I know there is an objective ethical standard the same way I know that the laws of physics are in full force and effect: They work in practice. We see the results of ethical behavior, and we see the results of unethical behavior, and there is little doubt as to which produces a happier and healthier society.

Eric the Red seems to want to avoid the pitfalls of relativism by appealing to an objective ethical standard. That's commendable, but objectivity isn't sufficient. There must also be an imperative. I.e. there must be an "oughtness" somewhere. There must be prescriptive authority. For example, if Eric declared that his standard of ethics was "all activities which are done between 0400 and 0900 hours GMT", that standard would be objective enough (not subjective), but it would completely lack any imperative oughtness. This standard would also lack prescriptive authority. I.e. "says who?!"
But even if an objective measurable framework was sufficient for ethics, notice that Eric has not actually divulged the standard. He asserts that "there is little doubt" as to what produces happiness in society. There is a big problem here. Is Eric claiming that "society" has one shared objective measure of happiness? Is a society something that can even *be* happy? I thought only individual persons could be happy. And if we have to go to the individual level to find out what makes someone happy, then we are right back to relativism. What makes Eric happy probably doesn't make me happy. So the objectivity of Eric's ethics seems to have evaporated.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 1:58 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
Nevertheless, my point remains that some types of behavior are more likely to produce a happy, healthy society than others.


Societies aren't persons. Individual persons within a society are happy or not happy, and individuals vary in what produces their happiness. So what is the actual standard of happiness? Is it just being pain free? Can someone be in pain *and* be happy at the same time? Does happiness require food, shelter, and Obamacare? Happiness needs an objective definition if it is to have any hope to stand as part of an objective standard for morality and ethics.

Quote:
If you honestly don't understand that happiness is preferable to misery and pleasure is preferable to pain, then we have nothing to talk about.


Clearly Eric the Red takes it as axiomatic that pleasure is preferable to pain. He has nothing to say to those who disagree. He will not defend this belief. Is he simply presupposing it in the same way that we presuppose the truth of Scripture? Or will he attempt to derive this belief using some self-referential syllogism? Isn't that what he accused Christians of doing?
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 3:36 am
Eric the Red seems to be tightly coupling pleasure and ethics, such that whatever feels good, is good. This is hedonism. Does Eric the Red believe there could be anything morally wrong with hedonism? What if we reached a point of technological automation and leisure such that we could escape into a "pleasure chamber" where endorphins were injected into our system to make us drift away into continuous euphoria? Would there be anything unethical about doing this? If there is no purpose or reason for us being here, and if we simply belong to ourselves and not to our Creator, then what objection could Eric the Red offer? Would he offer any objection?

Eric the Red has not given us any other criteria besides pain and happiness by which to determine ethics in his system, Can a mother in the pains of childbirth be happy? If there is both pain and joy, is this childbirth moral or immoral? What about laying down one's life for a brother? If it involves pain, is it immoral to do so in Eric's system? What about the pain of a life-saving surgery? Moral or immoral?
Can justice ever be moral if it involves displeasure?

If it is ever the case that enduring or causing pain is, in fact, the moral thing to do, then some other hidden criteria is at work in Eric's ethical system.
Eric the Red  Thursday, November 29, 2012 4:56 am
David, as an ontological matter, ethics are part of the physical world (and objective) because the human race depends on them for its continued existence. So comparing them to physics and physical health is a good analogy. And the reason it's "wrong" to have the ethics of a mosquito is the same as the reason it's "wrong" to jump in front of a train or out of a plane without a parachute. You insist on defining right and wrong in the sense of some lawgiver who makes moral decisions about things being right and wrong just because they are; I, however, define ethics in terms of the results they produce.

Katecho, I have to leave for work so I can't respond to most of your points until later today, but just to hit one: The fact that Christians boldly say that it is axiomatic that the Bible is true does not mean that it's axiomatic that the Bible is true, any more than a follower of Ayn Rand claiming that it's axiomatic that her writings are absolute truth would make that so either. And the moral imperative for ethics -- the ought -- is that it produces desirable results. You can quibble with who gets to decided what's desirable, just as you could quibble about whether it's desirable to be cold and hungry rather than warm and fed, but all that accomplishes is to make your world view look ridiculous.
Ioannes  Thursday, November 29, 2012 5:00 am
Eric the Red,

Why should I give two hoots about society? As long as I'm getting what I want, what does it matter? Maybe the rest of society would indeed go to pot if they all did what I did. So what? They aren't who I am, and there is no material causal connection between me doing whatever I want and anything anyone else does. The likelihood of me doing whatever I want causing the rest of society to collapse is minimal.

Cordially,
Iohannes.
Rick Davis  - re:  Thursday, November 29, 2012 5:24 am
Eric the Red wrote:
If you honestly don't understand that happiness is preferable to misery and pleasure is preferable to pain, then we have nothing to talk about.


I don't know if you're specifically equating happiness with pleasure, but the fact that you cavalierly dismiss discussion about the definitions of "desirability," "good," and "happiness," really narrows the debate. If happiness is equivalent to pleasure then the most desirable society would be the society that provides the most pleasure. If happiness is equivalent to wealth, then a society that provides the most wealth for it's members is most desirable. However, if happiness is, as Aristotle defines it, "an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue," then the society that creates the most virtuous citizens is the most desirable society.

But of course, then you're plunged into a discussion of what "virtue" means and how it can be attained. And at this point, you can't argue that virtue is simply what makes the most people happy, because the definition and nature of happiness is exactly what's on the table for discussion.

Unless Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Ethics, and a good number of philosophical tomes from throughout history are monumental wastes of time, then the question of morality, virtue, and the picture of a good society are much more complicated than you're letting on here.

The very fact that Socrates never formulated a satisfactory answer to Thrasymachus in itself should let you know that without a specific type of worldview in place it's going to be very hard (or I believe impossible) to offer a consistent and cogent philosophical answer to the man who says, "Screw society. If every human being on earth were to die 10 seconds after me, I don't care. I'm just going to get what I want in life."
Matthias McMahon  - Fed and Healthy  Thursday, November 29, 2012 8:10 am
Since it's better to be warm and fed than cold and hungry, I'm perfectly in my right to take the money from my family's medical fund (my wife is rather sick, and my 13 children have life-long illnesses) and buy 20 crates of Twinkies for myself.

Well, it's also better to be healthy than to be sick, so maybe I'll buy myself 20 crates of vegetables instead.
Jane Dunsworth  Thursday, November 29, 2012 9:22 am
Eric, what if there were a culture that had determined that the greatest amount of pleasure for all the people who deserved to be considered required the ripping out of the hearts (literally) of numbers of people each year? How would you judge their system to be ethically wrong, when they insisted that it was, in fact, working just fine to create the kind of society they desired?

As I'm sure you know, that's not an absurd hypothetical.
Eric the Red  Thursday, November 29, 2012 9:25 am
Rick, of course ethics is more complicated than I'm letting on here; this is a blog comment and not a doctoral dissertation. That said, let me see if I can clarify what I perceive to be the major point of disagreement.

If we were talking about nutrition, there are some who would claim that it isn't true nutrition unless it gives glory to God. The divine imperative to glorify God in everything includes food. My rejoinder is that God isn't necessary to understand that nutrition is essential to life, eating food is good for you (at least in moderation), and there are perfectly utilitarian reasons for people to eat good food. I will cheerfully concede that my views on nutrition do not include giving glory to God, nor are they concerned with vindicating some moral "ought", but since none of that is part of my worldview, if pressed on the issue my response will be "so what?" Whether by your Christian theology or my Humian utilitarianism, we both arrive at the same conclusion that nutrition is a desirable thing. The only practical difference is that I don't have to waste my time chasing an imperative that I don't think is there.

Likewise, everyone here, including me, agrees that ethics is a desirable thing. The rest of you seem convinced that there is some Divine imperative, or "ought", that hovers above it; I think utilitarianism is quite sufficient. I don't need God, the Bible, or the Christian church to tell me that both I and my community will be a lot better off if I engage in certain types of behavior and refrain from others. Experience tells us this, and experience is sufficient.

Now, there will be those, like Ioannes, who ask why they should care what's best for society if they can rape, pillage and plunder their way to the top. People who think like that won't be deterred whether God is part of the picture or not. If they won't listen to utilitarian arguments (and there are utilitarian arguments against rape, pillage and plunder, even if the rapist benefits in the short term; I can spell them out if need be), then they probably won't care that God says they shouldn't do it either. How many Catholic priests were sincere in their belief in God and in church teachings, and abused children anyway?
Eric the Red  Thursday, November 29, 2012 9:31 am
Jane, I would tell that society that, like a four year old who things that candy and ice cream for breakfast is a good thing, they have not yet matured to the point to understand what is actually "good" for them, in the sense of what will make a society that is truly a desirable place in which to live. (That, by the way, is also what I would tell Islamic jihadists, so the same issue is present whether one invokes religion or not.)

And they probably would pay me no attention, but that wouldn't mean I wouldn't be right.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 11:02 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
Likewise, everyone here, including me, agrees that ethics is a desirable thing.


This comment demonstrates a fundamental comprehension problem on Eric's part. The issue is not whether we value goodness. The issue is not even whether atheists have values or ethics. Of course they do. We all have a moral compass. Moral compasses are a dime a dozen. The problem is that certain worldviews, particularly naturalistic atheism, have no moral magnetic field to direct the compass. So the atheist can make his moral compass point in any direction he wishes, arbitrarily. There is no intent, purpose or direction (telos) in their worldview to support the value of anything. Value is not a property of matter in motion. Value judgments in a materialistic paradigm are therefore arbitrary and superfluous. Not to mention that value judgments have no influence on the laws of physics that control the motion of bits of matter anyway. Matter bounces around however it was going to, regardless of any ad hoc notion of "values" and "ethics". An honest materialist could conclude that ethical behaviors and posturing is just an accidental byproduct of complex organic chemistry. At some point Eric the Red will need to address these dilemmas.

Quote:
The rest of you seem convinced that there is some Divine imperative, or "ought", that hovers above it; I think utilitarianism is quite sufficient. I don't need God, the Bible, or the Christian church to tell me that both I and my community will be a lot better off if I engage in certain types of behavior and refrain from others. Experience tells us this, and experience is sufficient.


I take this as an important concession from Eric that his ethical framework contains no "ought". I.e. there is no imperative to his ethical theory. Rather Eric appeals to utilitarianism or functionalism. Thus his ethical theory is purely descriptive, and contains nothing prescriptive. Whatever "works" is descriptively labeled as "good" and "valuable" and "ethical". Whatever doesn't "work" is described as "bad" or "immoral". Prescription never enters into it. I'm surprised that Eric is not aware of the serious philosophical failures of utilitarianism. Perhaps he thinks he can overcome them. If he can, he'd be the first.

For example, if utilitarianism is sufficient to provide a rational value system and ethical system, then what does Eric the Red do with the fact that theism has vastly dominated in the rise and current state of civilization? If this is not proof of the superior utilitarian "value" of theistic belief over against atheism, then why not? Likewise, what standard is Eric using to declare if a value or ethic "works"? In evolution, the only criteria would be whether the population rises to dominate other populations. I.e. survival as quantified by measuring relative population. In this system, a belief can be completely false, and still "work". Truth never enters into it. Just as truth never enters into Eric's utilitarian-based ethics.

There are so many problems here that I'm frankly surprised Eric has committed himself to the minefield of utilitarianism in such a public fashion.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 11:16 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
I will cheerfully concede that my views on nutrition do not include giving glory to God, nor are they concerned with vindicating some moral "ought", but since none of that is part of my worldview, if pressed on the issue my response will be "so what?" Whether by your Christian theology or my Humian utilitarianism, we both arrive at the same conclusion that nutrition is a desirable thing. The only practical difference is that I don't have to waste my time chasing an imperative that I don't think is there.

Of course, with zero imperative, and lacking any prescribing foundation of any kind, this is precisely why Eric will never be able to argue that his ethical system should be observed. It can be safely ignored without any value consequence whatever. Why? Because his ethical system is completely void of imperative value. All it can do is describe how actions unfold. It cannot ascribe value to any of the actions. Eric can *describe* that we assign value to iPads and not to torture, but he can never prescribe that we should have.
Regarding Eric's entire ethical program (which, we realize, is not a program at all), we can quite safely conclude: "so what?"
Notice that Eric says "so what?" to our worldview, but he does so by importing his unbelief into our ethical system (party foul). When we say "so what?" to his ethical program, we reach this conclusion, not by importing our theism into it, but by simply granting his materialistic presuppositions.
Eric the Red  Thursday, November 29, 2012 2:12 pm
"Thus his ethical theory is purely descriptive, and contains nothing prescriptive."

Yes, you finally understand my premise, but you've missed the conclusion that necessarily follows from that premise.

The reason why "anything goes" won't work as an ethical system -- the reason you can't, as you put it, point your moral compass in any direction you like -- is because ethics is descriptive, just as any other science is descriptive. That is, it tells us how things work in the world in which we actually live.

Spend a couple of minutes seriously thinking through what a true "anything goes" society would look like, and you will soon realize it would be completely unliveable. "Anything goes" doesn't work any better in ethics than it would in chemistry or physics, and for the same reason.

If you want a society that people can actually enjoy living in, there are certain types of behavior that, as an objective matter, can't be tolerated. Period. Asking "why not just say that killing is OK" is like asking "why not just say that two plus two equals five". And the answer, in both cases, is that because in the real world, it isn't. Not, that is, if you want to have a society that anyone would actually like to live in.
Douglas Wilson  Thursday, November 29, 2012 2:46 pm
Eric (the R),

But you have to agree that the ideal circumstance would be to live in a society where everybody else obeyed the pragmatic moral law, but where you, the one lone atheist, got to disobey it secretly, as it suited you, and as you could get away with it.

Right?
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 4:43 pm
Doug's example is commonly discussed as the Prisoner's Dilemma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma). This is a fatal flaw for Eric's cooperative "it just works" ethical theory. Why? Because analysis of the Prisoner's Dilemma in game theory demonstrates very powerfully that betrayal works! Not only does it work, but contrary to intuition, both prisoners actually get a higher payoff by betraying one another, rather than by cooperating. There is nothing Eric can prescribe against this betrayal. It works.

As a side note, Doug's question alludes to the fact that nothing in Eric's moral theory addresses immorality which occurs in our inner thought lives. A completely perverse thought life doesn't even get measured in Eric's pragmatic materialism.
Ioannes  Thursday, November 29, 2012 4:48 pm
Eric the Red,

The question is not what might deter whom, but rather what is the justification (if any) for the basic principles of your ethical framework. Why do you assume society should be the highest good to which others are subordinate? I have seen no reason to regard it as anything other than a god you take on faith.

Cordially,
Iohannes
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 4:58 pm
I had written:
Quote:
"Thus his ethical theory is purely descriptive, and contains nothing prescriptive."


Eric the Red responded:
Quote:
Yes, you finally understand my premise, but you've missed the conclusion that necessarily follows from that premise.

The reason why "anything goes" won't work as an ethical system -- the reason you can't, as you put it, point your moral compass in any direction you like -- is because ethics is descriptive, just as any other science is descriptive. That is, it tells us how things work in the world in which we actually live.


Eric the Red acknowledges that he has nothing prescriptive to say regarding ethics and values, yet he immediately tries to prescribe anyway, by saying that certain things just have to be valued anyway, because "they work". This is a bald attempt to sneak prescription in through the back door. Eric the Red-handed.

If there are no prescriptions, and no imperatives (and Eric has refreshingly granted that there are none in his materialism), then whatever is, simply is. No prescriptive value can be placed upon actions one way or another. Whether a behavior is widely liked or disliked, this says nothing about its value. All that Eric can say is that "such and such a behavior is, or is not, widely preferred". Such a statement is descriptive, but it has nothing whatever to say about what has moral or ethical value. Therefore Eric is not doing ethics. He is simply cataloging existing human behavior.

That a certain behavior exists is all that is required in Eric's paradigm to establish that the behavior "works". Why? Because if a behavior did not "work" then it would not exist for Eric to describe. Whatever is, is. If a behavior or action occurs, not only does it work, it was unavoidable as a consequence of the laws of physics. Eric is invited to show this conclusion invalid from within his materialism, if he can.

Now Eric may suggest that when he says that some behavior "works", he means that it is the majority practice. That's fine. Theism is by far the majority practice on the planet. Atheism is a minority by a wide margin. If that is our criteria, then theism clearly works better than atheism, from a purely pragmatic standpoint. And Eric can't even draw any prescriptive conclusions or values from this raw fact. Whatever is, is.

You buttered this bread, now lie in it.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 5:29 pm
Eric the Red's pragmatism is particularly vulnerable on so many layers.

Pragmatism has about as much to do with ethics as the choice of symbols for the suits used on a deck of playing cards. Notice how well each symbol "works" to differentiate suits. And look how objective it is too. But does this mean that the symbol choice is an ethical matter? Given Eric's "ethical" criteria, why not? Would it be immoral for the suits to have had some other symbol instead? No. There are no ethical properties involved in the symbol choice, even though it works.

Eric's pragmatism confuses ethics with mere conventions. A study in common conventions is not ethics.

Not only this, but Eric's pragmatism is free of any prescription as well, which means that even if the symbol choice of a deck of cards were somehow a deeply ethical concern, Eric has acknowledged that he still couldn't prescribe the proper symbols anyway.

Cataloging various human conventions is simply not ethics.

If Eric wanted to just start over again from scratch and rethink this entire topic, I wouldn't hold it against him. His current road seems to be headed toward ethical nihilism.
Eric the Red  Thursday, November 29, 2012 5:46 pm
Doug, it might be fun to spend a little time in a world in which everyone had moral scruples except me, just as it would be fun to live in a world in which all of my lottery tickets were winners, supermodels line up outside my bedroom door, and I can eat as much junk food as I like without getting fat. That, however, is not the world I actually live in, and this takes me back to one of my original points: Ethics is based on the world in which we actually live, the natures that humans actually have, and the real-world consequences that accompany behavior. If the world operated differently than it does, then ethical standards would be different than they are, but this is now.

Iohannes, society is important because humans are more prosperous and do better if they live together in community, as evidenced by the fact that very few people choose to be hermits. Most people probably could not survive (or survive very well) if they were not part of a community. So, by acting against the best interests of the community, you would be acting against the entity that allows you to be far more productive and prosperous than you could on your own.

Kateco, you are equivocating on the meaning of the phrase "it works"; you're defining it differently than I did. When I say something "works", what I mean is that it produces the intended result, and not that there is some moral virtue inherent in it. As applied to ethics, it's simply a matter of determining what kind of behavior is most likely to produce a society whose members are happy and productive.

Oh, and Kateco, as I've said here before, even if I agreed with you (as I do not) that religion is required for an ethical framework, that would merely make atheism unpleasant but not necessarily untrue. There are many true things that are unpleasant. "X can't be true because it would be unpleasant if it were" is not a logical argument.
Eric the Red  Thursday, November 29, 2012 6:23 pm
Let me give you an example of how utilitarian ethics "works". I once worked for a company that provided contract services to another company notorious for finding creative ways to avoid paying its bills and shifting its costs to other people. In our case, that meant simply writing off and refusing to pay about a quarter to a third of our invoices for work we had legitimately done. And the reason we put up with it is because there is a glut of companies that provide the same service we did; had we resisted, they would have simply fired us and found another starving company to do the same thing. It was better to have some income, even if we were cheated out of what we were entitled to, than it was to have no income at all.

So, as is entirely predictable, we started padding our bills. If something took me an hour, I'd put on my time sheet that it took two. This was the only way that we could actually get paid for work we had actually done and keep our doors open. We used to have staff meetings, in fact, to discuss how put Pulitzer-prize deserving fiction on our billing statements that would make it past their accounting department.

And this turned into a mini-arms race; they would come up with increasingly creative ways to not pay us, and we would come up with increasingly creative ways to pad out bills. I left after a year because I was spending almost as much time on billing issues as I was on substantive work, and it was driving me crazy, plus habitual lying, even in self defense, is not how I want to make a living.

As I look back on it, the lost productivity to both companies was staggering. An enormous amount of time and resources could have been saved by both companies had we been able to send honest invoices in the first place, knowing that we would be paid for our labor rather than cheated by a company looking to get something for nothing.

Now, is God going to punish us for what we did? I don't believe in God, so I think the answer is no. But the punishment comes in wasted productivity, squandered resources, and lost opportunity since an hour spent finagling over a bill is an hour that could have been used for far more productive efforts. So even without God in the picture, we got punished. Both of us. And my advice to both companies, were I now to advise both of them, would be to have an honest business ethic in the first place. Utilitarianism works.
David Stewart  Friday, November 30, 2012 8:34 am
Eric,

Except you still don't seem to realize that with a utilitarian view of ethics, you still have to have a goal in mind. The people responding to you on this blog are trying to get you to understand that in order to avoid irrationality, just being arbitrary and doing or saying something just because, you need to be able to justify in some cogent manner what the goal is. Whether its a feeling, a measurable outcome, or whatever, you have to be able to explain why that is the goal. After all, when we talk about sociopolitical ethics we are very often not saying "This is right for me, but you can do what you want". We don't talk about rape, murder, stealing, and those sorts of activities that way. When we condemn these sorts of acts, or when we elevate other actions, we are saying that others besides us should or should not do such things in similar circumstances. It is the "ought" of ethics that requires justification.

And that is just one of the myriad problems with a utilitarian explanation of ethics. It just cannot survive outside of the nested little play-pen that its proponents construct for it. For example, it provides no basis at all against tyranny. The classic example discussed in philosophy classes goes something like this. If there is a rapist on the loose in town, and the police cannot catch him, but they do know of an odd-ball hermit who no one likes or trusts who lives in this town, and who some suspect might be the culprit despite the absence of any evidence, and the authorities go and kill this hermit because they decide that the benefit to society (improved trust in the authorities, perhaps a deterrent to other would-be rapists, maybe scaring the actual rapist out of town, making people feel safer that the police are getting the job done) outweigh the downsides (one dead hermit), then the utility to society would justify this action.

You still have to decide who gets to decide on the measure of utility as well. Is it my happiness? The group? Whose in the group?

When you say that things "work", you cannot make that statement without having an end in mind. What we're asking is, 'Which end?' You have people who do, in fact, enjoy anarchy, enjoy murder, enjoy things that you and I and the others on this blog condemn. Are they actually wrong, or is what you are talking about a kind of might makes right, where there is no right and wrong in principle, but rather there is only the consequences of the larger group of people who might oppose certain behaviors. Do you see how, in another society, one that believes in owning slaves on a racial basis, beating small children, raping, and pillaging, that based on utilitarian theory, there is no moral high ground to oppose this? They just have a different utilitarian scale.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 7:53 pm
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
Now, is God going to punish us for what we did? I don't believe in God, so I think the answer is no. But the punishment comes in wasted productivity, squandered resources, and lost opportunity since an hour spent finagling over a bill is an hour that could have been used for far more productive efforts. So even without God in the picture, we got punished. Both of us.


Eric is begging the question by assuming that because the world appears to have built-in consequences, that somehow God is irrelevant. In the Christian view, God has providentially made the world in such a way that sin is unsustainable and has painful consequences. I.e., we reap what we sow. At no point is God "out of the picture". Eric is simply restating his unbelief.

Quote:
And my advice to both companies, were I now to advise both of them, would be to have an honest business ethic in the first place. Utilitarianism works.

What about the Prisoner's Dilemma? Betrayal benefits both prisoners. I notice that he didn't address that issue yet.

Also, utilitarianism can only do useful "work" as an ethical system if it can actually prescribe how businesses should operate. Eric's utilitarian ethics specifically cannot prescribe anything. Eric keeps trying to smuggle prescription back in the side window, but he disguises it as "advice" instead. Here advice is just a poor man's prescription. Advice is prescription without authority. Should businesses take Eric's advice? According to Eric, they should not, because there are no shoulds. Eric is just sharing his personal anecdotes. They cannot form a rational basis for any action.
Eric the Red  Thursday, November 29, 2012 8:13 pm
No, I'm not prescribing anything. I'm saying, "If you want X result, you need to engage in Y behavior." That's an observation, not a moral judgment.

The world doesn't merely appear to have built-in consequences; it does have built-in consequences. We can argue about causation (i.e., why does the world have built-in consequences), but that's a separate subject. And merely observing that cause produces effect is also an observation rather than a moral judgment.

The prisoner's dilemma is a special case because it involves two people who have already engaged in unethical behavior, each of whom is now trying to evade the full consequences of his behavior. I think the real message of the prisoner's dilemma is that if you're going to commit a crime, do it all by yourself so you don't have to worry about an accomplice dropping a dime on you.

But the prisoner's dilemma isn't helpful to you regardless, because the ethical thing for the prisoner to do is to confess his wrong and accept his punishment, regardless of how it impacts his accomplice. Your question implies that the desirable end is for the prisoner to not just commit a wrong, but to also get away with it, and I really don't think that's what you want to argue.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 8:45 pm
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
When I say something "works", what I mean is that it produces the intended result, and not that there is some moral virtue inherent in it. As applied to ethics, it's simply a matter of determining what kind of behavior is most likely to produce a society whose members are happy and productive.


This is a very important admission from Eric. Notice that he has now acknowledged that his ethical system is not concerned with determining the goodness or badness of a given action. That is irrelevant. The only criteria is whether the action promotes a chosen end. The end has no inherent moral virtue or moral property in it either, so Eric is careful (so far) not to establish the goodness or badness of an action by referring to its virtue-less byproduct. So what do we call this kind of ethic? We call it amoral. It is void of any concern for goodness or badness. Eric has invented an amoral ethical framework. Fortunately, without any prescriptive capacity, it remains a defused passive framework which does not allow Eric to actually *do* ethics with it. I.e. it can never form a rational policy.

Let's suppose for a moment that Eric's theory could help us determine a list of behaviors which are most likely to produce a happy society. Firstly, without any prescription or imperative, all we would have at the end of this project would be a list of conducive behaviors, blinking back at us. What do we do with this list? Do we enact it as policy? Eric has already said there is nothing prescriptive about his ethics, so on what theory is it to be imposed on anyone? It is nothing but a cataloging exercise. Eric is not doing ethics yet.

Eric holds that ethical behavior is that behavior which "works".
By "works" he means that it promotes some desired result.
The goodness or badness of the behavior is irrelevant so long as it "works".
Eric tells us nothing of where our desired results should come from (there are no prescriptions anywhere in his system).
Eric arbitrarily chooses a "happy society" as *the* desired result (perhaps because he assumes this is self-evident that we ought to desire it, and he insists that no one should look too closely at that question because there are no oughts in his worldview).
Eric admits that there is no moral virtue found in his desired result. At best it is just an accidental feature of the laws of motion acting on matter for a really long time.


Quote:
Oh, and Kateco, as I've said here before, even if I agreed with you (as I do not) that religion is required for an ethical framework, that would merely make atheism unpleasant but not necessarily untrue. There are many true things that are unpleasant. "X can't be true because it would be unpleasant if it were" is not a logical argument.


Fortunately, I've not argued that "atheism can't be true because it would be unpleasant if it were". So that's just an Eric-the-Red-Herring.

Rather I've argued that Eric's materialistic atheism has not begun to provide a rational foundation for ethics, as it pretends to do. His "ethics" is missing all of the ingredients of an actual moral framework:

- it offers no prescription, no ought or should
- it has no authoritative source
- it provides no rational (non-arbitrary) criteria for selecting ends (they are simply assumed)
- it provides no rational method of determining the moral value of the chosen ends
- it provides no rational method of determining the moral value of the means, other than to affirm the consequent (which would be a logical fallacy if Eric went there)
- the moral value of an action is not even determined by the goodness or badness of the action, but simply whether it promotes the selected end (Eric's is an amoral ethic)

Eric seems very close to embracing ethical nihilism.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 9:56 pm
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
The prisoner's dilemma is a special case because it involves two people who have already engaged in unethical behavior, each of whom is now trying to evade the full consequences of his behavior.

Fortunately, Eric's consequentialist ethics has them both covered. I can hear Eric now, "*if* the prisoners want to maximize their happiness, my *advice* is for each to betray their mate". What if evading consequences makes them happy? If they desire to be happy, then betrayal "works"! Do the math. Eric buttered this bread. How does his amoral utilitarianism taste?

Eric is trying to piggyback on our moral instincts about evading criminal consequences, but he has nothing to say against such a goal from his utilitarian worldview. In fact, evasion comports very well with the goal of happiness.

Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
I think the real message of the prisoner's dilemma is that if you're going to commit a crime, do it all by yourself so you don't have to worry about an accomplice dropping a dime on you.

Evasion.

Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
But the prisoner's dilemma isn't helpful to you regardless, because the ethical thing for the prisoner to do is to confess his wrong and accept his punishment, regardless of how it impacts his accomplice.


Either Eric has forgotten himself and offered up a prescription about what each prisoner ought to do, "regardless of how it impacts his accomplice", or else he is trying to speak for me. I'll assume the latter, for his sake, but see below for why there is no dilemma for Christians.

In any case the Prisoner's Dilemma is helpful to me because it pokes a large hole in his utilitarian ethics because betraying "works" in that scenario. Eric is free to argue with the math if he disagrees.

Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
Your question implies that the desirable end is for the prisoner to not just commit a wrong, but to also get away with it, and I really don't think that's what you want to argue.


Why is Eric trying to put his shoes on my feet? I'm a Christian, not a naturalist, or a utilitarian hedonist. I believe in the final Judgment. The prisoner's dilemma creates no dilemma at all for me, because our God is omniscient and will bring all secret things into the light of His righteous judgment. In other words, the math may show a payoff for betrayal in this life, but there is no such payoff when the final Judgment is also taken into consideration in the math. Thus no dilemma for us.

Still waiting for Eric's resolution of this dilemma from *his* paradigm.
katecho  Thursday, November 29, 2012 10:19 pm
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
No, I'm not prescribing anything.


Please. Do we have to go back in the logs and find examples where Eric complains and tells Doug all the things he should or shouldn't be doing, and how?
Does Eric think we have lost our memories, or is Eric's commitment to a prescriptionless ethical system brand new as of the last few days?

Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
The world doesn't merely appear to have built-in consequences; it does have built-in consequences.


Eric's business anecdote referred to built-in moral consequences related to moral actions such as cheating and honesty. Eric wasn't talking about mechanical action-reaction, he was talking about something explicitly karmic. This simply does not obtain in his naturalism. In order to have built-in moral consequences, there would have to be a moral builder, with intent, anticipating the eventual evolution of moral agents. (Unless Eric wants to argue that natural moral consequences are a recent development and didn't exist before moral agents evolved.) We will have to see if Eric moves toward karmic pantheism, or backpeddles further into amoralism. I predict a backpeddle.
Eric the Red  Friday, November 30, 2012 4:49 am
Kateco, I'm not sure if you are deliberately misunderstanding my position or honestly not understanding my position, but very little of what you've written bears any relationship to what I've said.

At the most fundamental level, you seem not to understand that short-term gain and long-term best interest are not the same thing. Sure, I will feel good if I spend my money on a lavish vacation rather than on paying the mortgage, but when the process server shows up at my door with foreclosure papers, I'll wish I'd done things differently.

The prisoner in the prisoner's dilemma may reap a short term benefit by (further) behaving badly, but it's ultimately in both his and everyone else's long term interest to have not behaved badly in the first place, or at least to not make it worse. If you honestly don't get that, then you're at the same level as the person who doesn't understand why warm and fed is preferable to cold and hungry.

But since you're probably going to misunderstand that too, I'm now going on to other things.
Matthias McMahon  Friday, November 30, 2012 5:15 am
If I decide to spend the last of my money on food for my ailing wife and kids (see my example above), with the long term result being that I'll die from starvation, is it then a "bad" thing that I gave them that money? I gain, neither short-term nor long-term. In what way did my altruistic manner "work"? A little curious.
katecho  Friday, November 30, 2012 8:14 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Quote:
The prisoner in the prisoner's dilemma may reap a short term benefit by (further) behaving badly, but it's ultimately in both his and everyone else's long term interest to have not behaved badly in the first place, or at least to not make it worse. If you honestly don't get that, then you're at the same level as the person who doesn't understand why warm and fed is preferable to cold and hungry.


No one thinks the Prisoner's Dilemma is intended to suggest that crime "works" as a lifestyle. Including Eric. Such an objection is simply misdirection on Eric's part. Rather the point is that there are situations that Eric's utilitarian ethics either fails to address at all, or which cause his system to produce an immoral behavior. Eric doesn't even try to address this. He does not embrace the implications of his own hedonistic utilitarianism, even when betrayal "works". This informs us that Eric is simply not being consistent. For certain situations, he behaves contrary to his utilitarianism, and must be using/borrowing some other unstated reasoning.

Also, even if Eric wanted to table the Prisoner's Dilemma for now, he still hasn't even begun to address all the other more significant failures of his moral theory that have been pointed out. Next to those, the Prisoner's Dilemma is down the list a ways.
Rick Davis  Friday, November 30, 2012 5:11 am
Eric,

Since you're at the receiving end of a barrage of comments, I don't know if you'll have the time or inclination to answer this question. I'm curious as to how you would respond to Plato's "Ring of Gyges" scenario. I think it sets up a good test.

Just so I don't have to type it all out, here's a link to the wiki article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges

I'm not sure what motivation there would be to remain just in such circumstances apart from an objective, transcendental moral code. Of course, one could just object that circumstances like this one can't happen in reality, but for the sake of the argument, I'd like to hear your answer within the parameters of the parable.
katecho  Friday, November 30, 2012 8:38 am
This is really helpful. The Ring of Gyges highlights the amorality of Eric's utilitarianism.

The utility of an action is an economic analysis, not a moral one. If injustice is more profitable than justice, Eric's consequentialism offers no restraining principle. This is why Eric does not even pretend that there is any moral virtue in the choice of his desired results. Our desires (even for happiness) are purely accidental in naturalism. Our preferences got deposited in us as consequences of survival pressures.

Glaucon, a character in Plato's Republic, argues:
Quote:
And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice...


Eric's utilitarianism is driven by social pressures, social conditioning, and social consequences, not by actual moral considerations or even reason.
Arwen B.  - The conqustadores thank you  Friday, November 30, 2012 8:28 am
Eric the Red wrote:
Jane, I would tell that society that, like a four year old who things that candy and ice cream for breakfast is a good thing, they have not yet matured to the point to understand what is actually "good" for them, in the sense of what will make a society that is truly a desirable place in which to live. (That, by the way, is also what I would tell Islamic jihadists, so the same issue is present whether one invokes religion or not.)

And they probably would pay me no attention, but that wouldn't mean I wouldn't be right.


Doesn't this strike you as a terribly sociocentric way to deal with another culture's sacred traditions?

It seems to me that in a more ...robust... age than our current one, the very concept of another society being immaute compared to one's own would spur men (some of good will, even) to assist the immature society to abandon their detrimental practices. After all, if one's child insisted on eating candy for breakfast, one would not merely stand by saying "Oh, no, dear, that's really bad for you," would one? On the contrary, one would stop the child from eating the candy, using physical force if necessary.

I really think the Eric the Red has done colonial apologists a great favor here, in providing a cogent and non-religious justification for the conquest of "less advanced" civilizations.
katecho  Friday, November 30, 2012 9:02 am
Excellent point. This quote is another example of Eric forgetting himself and prescribing stuff to other societies that are already "working just fine". Eric can't shrink back and claim he is just offering "advice" because he has said that he is right whether they enact his policy or not. He holds them to be in error if they don't follow his prescription. Eric acknowledges that his worldview can't prescribe anything, but that doesn't stop him. Eric has not fully embraced his ethical nihilism.
Scott Dodge  - Overcoming Kant?  Friday, November 30, 2012 9:27 am
I would note that an apparent contradiction of sorts crept into the discussion seemingly unnoticed: Asking the question- "What would happen if everybody did that?"

Doesn't this derive from Kant's first formulation of his moral imperative: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction," as set forth in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals?

What is notable about this as it bears on the discussion is the fact that Kant insisted that a true moral maxim cannot be determined by particular conditions or the identity of the person who is reasoning morally, which is just to say that a necessary condition for a moral maxim to be true is that it must have universality. In other words (not mine) such a maxim "must be disconnected from the particular physical details surrounding the proposition, and could be applied to any rational being."

So, if that is the algorithim of the moral calculation (to use probably a bad metaphor), then it seems Doug's insistence that Kant must be overcome does not hold.

Theologically, I am interested in the fact that the identity of the person, namely a Christian, who we are in Christ, which seems to go some distance towards overcoming some of Eric's concerns and the charge of circularity.