Could you find a way off this addiction?
Then the "truth" will out!

No, neither reactionary nor inflammatory. Thanks.

How can you claim to not establish a moral hierarchy if the goal of your argument is to justify moral validity in one group of citizens and deny moral validity in another?
Easy answer: That's not my goal. As per my example with physicalism, one need not think that physicalists are doppelgangers to think that phsyicalism as a theory cannot account for consciousness.

Second, (and I’m sure you put this in your essay), why do you think it is impossible that one who believes in a “Darwinist” framework of reality cannot justify morality through a Darwinian model? If a society determines morality and exacts punishment for being what they deem immoral, is it not Darwinian to accept the imposed morality regardless of how that morality was defined?

Whatever else may be said, to say that society creates morality is already to abandon moral realism. (See abundant literature.) I have already noted that my issue is with the increasing number of philosophers who wish to combine evolutionary naturalism with moral realism. (The moral realist would maintain that it is in principle possible for societal laws to be immoral. Else, we should have to say that slavery was moral in those cultures that embraced that institution.)

Since you brought up Nietzsche, even altruism can be Darwinian when self sacrifice increases the chances that your family (therefore your direct genetic lineage), country, or society prospers over those to whom you sacrificed yourself. This Darwinian reasoning for altruism has nothing to do with the Nietzscheistic (?) notion that altruism is predicated on the assumption that others are more important than themselves.

I'm not sure I follow here. I recommended to Jeffc two books that address this: Joyce and the Wilson/Sober volume. There are varieties of ants that display "altruistic" behavior in the extended biological sense of self-sacrificial behavior that benefits the group. But no one working in this area thinks that they are little Mother Theresas. The moral notion of altruism need not assume that the other person is more important. It need only be action that benefits the other person for the sake of the other person.

And finally, is it fair to say that Nietzsche is not an atheist, but a “wannabe”? I have always been confused as to why Nietzsche is always unquestionably labeled an atheist, since his often quoted “God is dead” implies that there was a god in the first place.

Josh, don't take "God is dead" literally. All that Nietzsche meant was that the concept of God was no longer a viable option among European intellectuals. There never was a God, even though the concept had, for a time, been influential. My books are upstairs, and I always confuse two works by Nietzsche: It is either Twilight of the Idols or The Anti-Christ that serves as a great little intro to his thought (I think it is the former).

Finally, Nietzsche himself maintained that people like George Eliot and the "English flatheads" (his term) were simply inconsistent in rejecting God but continuing to embrace morality.

One might explain the fact that morality lingers even after God's funeral on the grounds that the fundamental orientation resposnible for our thinking in moral categories is "hardwired" into human nature. As atheist Kai Nielsen likes to point out in debates (to the Christians in the audience), "If I persuaded you tonight that your belief in God is false, you would not go home and start beating your wife and children." His point: our moral convictions run much deeper than episodic religious beliefs.

But there are two ways of explaining the hardwiring: an evolutionary one, and one that appeals to a Creator and the imago dei. Once again, it seems to come back to a choice between Hume and Reid.

________________

My Opie impression: circa 1963.

That's not my goal. As per my example with physicalism, one need not think that physicalists are doppelgangers to think that physicalism as a theory cannot account for consciousness.

Ok, but in my opinion (as if you couldn’t guess), it’s a tough pill to swallow to say that you can find theists’ morality validated by their world view, atheists’ morals invalidated by their world view, and then not derive or even imply, explicitly or implicitly, that theists morality is therefore superior to atheist morality. However, if you maintain that you are not doing that, then I’ll accept it.

Whatever else may be said, to say that society creates morality is already to abandon moral realism.

Fair enough, but that wasn’t what I was trying to get at. My example was clumsily formed, but I still think the point is valid, so let me rephrase. Why can’t the morals of a society evolve naturally to a point where a moral consensus is at any one time sustained by a society that then imparts judgment on those that run afoul of the socially recognized standard of morality? The morality of any one individual as imposed by society from the product of moral evolution at any one time is agnostic to the source of the moral standards. Therefore, the source of morality, in my view, does not reflect at all, either positively or negatively, on the validity of one’s morality.

There are varieties of ants that display "altruistic" behavior in the extended biological sense of self-sacrificial behavior that benefits the group. But no one working in this area thinks that they are little Mother Theresas.

Right, and no one is arguing that the ants are making a conscious decision to sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony. Regardless, there may be circumstances in all species where it is advantageous for some members to be altruistic. Therefore, it may be evolutionarily advantageous for all species to display some sort of altruism. We have found, especially in human models, that it is advantageous for some humans to be altruistic for the good of their family (to protect their family line), society, or country. Whether it be Mother Theresa devoting her life to spreading the word of Christ (to maintain her society, the Christian Church), a soldier at war dying for the success of their country, or a father running into a burning building to save his children, in each case we have a Darwinian response to succeed because failure to do so increases the chances of extinction of the society, country, or family. Therefore, we have evolved, out of necessity for survival, for it to be morally acceptable to be altruistic. However we come to the standard of our morals is irrelevant because the end justifies the means in the Darwinian model. So again, I maintain that the source of morality does not reflect the validity of those morals.

Josh.

...However, if you maintain that you are not doing that, then I’ll accept it.

That's good. You should. The point is worldview assessment: a matter of asking what it is reasonable for us to believe. The parallel to critiwues of (varieties of) physicalism is better than I originally thought. In that case, NO ONE who is party to the dispute thinks that there is no such thing as consciousness. The point is, we KNOW there is such a thing. Now it's a matter of making an inference to the best explanation. If the critique of physicalism is correct, no one supposes that people who embrace the theory of physicalism are any less conscious than those who hold a theory that does an adequate job of explaining it. In the case of morality, the starting point is that we all, theists and atheists alike, believe that rape and child molestation are wrong, that kindnesses ought to be reciprocated, etc. If some version of the moral argument goes through, all it shows is that naturalists do not have the resources within their worldview to explain the moral knowledge that they share with theists.

...Therefore, the source of morality, in my view, does not reflect at all, either positively or negatively, on the validity of one’s morality.

You really need to read my original essay to be in a position to argue here. The first major section deals with the "genetic fallacy."

That fallacy is committed when we suppose that facts about the origin of a belief entail the falseness of the belief. (E.g., "You believe that because you were raised in a culture where everyone believes it. Therefore, it is false.") One might suppose that an argument that begins by pointing to the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs and concludes that those beliefs lack "positive epistemic value" is guilty of that fallacy.

The essay is right there to be read (the section titled "AEN and the Genetic Fallacy"), but here is the line of argument that I pursue and think is correct: Whenever we have some reason for supposing that the best explanation for why someone believes a thing does not essentially entail the truth of the thing believed, we have an "undercutting defeater" for the belief. Here's my attempt at a humorous example of an undercutting defeater from the essay:

Bertrand Russell allegedly once observed, “Everything looks yellow to a person suffering from jaundice.” Actually, I believe the truth of the matter is that people suffering from jaundice look yellow. But suppose that both are right: jaundiced people both appear and are appeared-to yellowly. Jones enters Dr. Smith’s office, complaining of various and vague discomforts. Smith takes one look at Jones and exclaims, “Your skin has a very yellowish appearance!” He diagnoses Jones with jaundice and prescribes accordingly. Later, it occurs to Smith that all of his patients have a yellowish tint, as do his charts, the floor tiles, once-white pills and the nurses’ uniforms. A simple blood test determines that he is suffering from jaundice. Jones would have appeared yellow to him regardless of his actual condition. Has Smith now a reason for supposing Jones is jaundiced is false in the way that, say, a negative blood test would provide such a reason? It seems not. Perhaps Jones is jaundiced. Smith simply lacks any reason for thinking that Jones’ appearance was caused by Jones’ condition, or that the belief that Jones was jaundiced is epistemically dependent upon any medical facts about Jones. And this is to suggest that facts about Dr. Smith’s own condition have now supplied him with an undercutting defeater for his belief regarding Jones’ condition.

I argue rather elaborately that, once it is properly understood, a Darwinian account puts us in precisely that position with regard to fundamental moral beliefs. The point is that (a) we have reason to think that, given natural selecftion, a basic moral orientation evolves because it is "fitness-aimed" and (b) we've no reason to think that a moral belief's being fitness-aimed is dependent upon the actual truth of the beliefs that it engenders. All that matters from the standpoint of natural seledction is that we behave in a way that had a tendency to pass on our DNA. As Darwin's own example shows, conscience would have dictated just about ANYTHING to us (uincluding siblicide and infanticide) were the conditions of survival appropriate to it.

So perhaps like Dr. Smith who, given his jaundiced condition, would have believed that Jones was jaundiced whether he actually was or not, our evolutionary heritage has left us believing that the world is populated by objective moral properties whether it actually is or not.

(Thus, through all of this, I argue that one need not argue that we KNOW that there is NOT na relation of dependence of fitness upon truth. The burden of proof is actually upon the moral realist who accepts evolutionary naturalism to show why we should believe that there IS such a dependence relation. Lacking such a positive reason forthcoming from the evolutionary naturalist (and much of the essay is devoted to show that the attempts to offer such are just implausible on several grounds), the conclusion is that human moral beloiefrs in general, and the theory of moral realism in particular, are without warrant.

I will not say that I do not have my own opriginal contribution in the ongoing essay--I do. But on all of this, it links elbows with several significant discussions by Street, Joyce, Tamler and Sommers, and others.

________________

My Opie impression: circa 1963.

This was to be the intro to the larger essay that I'm working on--until I ordered a book from Amazon and discovered that the author begins in an almost identical way. This may be the only way this material will see the light of day.

(I offer it here in this context because it places the discussion in a wider philosophical context, taking in the likes of Nietzsche, Sartre, Russell and Santayana. Nothing to fear here: I advance no arghument at all. It is all descriptive of what other people--atheists to the person, I think--have said.)

Morality and the Death of God

The popular quarterly, The Century, featured F.W.H. Myers’ eulogy for his friend, Mary Anne Evans—better known as George Eliot—in the year following her death.

"I remember how, at Cambridge, I walked with her once in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity, on an evening of rainy May; and she, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men—the words God, Immortality, Duty—pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third."

Evans had long since rejected theistic belief, but held fast to a sense of moral duty. Morality simply did not require a religious foundation. Indeed, the religious impulse dilutes the moral, as thoughts of another world distract from the duties of the present, and hope of an eternal reward reduces moral motivation to a form of egoism. Instead, hers was a 'Religion of Humanity,' involving “the expansion of the sense of human fellowship into an impulse strong enough to compel us to live for others, even though it be beneath the on-coming shadow of an endless night."

Just a few years later, and in the midst of a tirade against nearly anyone and everyone ever to put pen to paper, Nietzsche heaped scorn upon “G. Eliot” and her fellow “English flatheads.” He complained, “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality.” But this “English consistency,” he argued, is altogether inconsistent. He urged that, in giving up the Christian faith, “one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” The “duty” to which Eliot and her freethinking friends appealed, was actually part and parcel of the system that is Christianity. “By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.” Indeed, the moral “intuitions” to which Eliot and others appealed were nothing more than the lingering effects of Christianity upon that society—fading echoes of the late deity’s voice, whose churches remained as his tombs and sepulchers.

If Eliot held out for the reality of a moral law over against the illusion of religion, Nietzsche countered with the exclamation, “Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities.” Nietzsche’s moral nihilism is handily summarized with his assertion, “There are altogether no moral facts.” And there are no such facts precisely because neither are there any theological ones. Nietzsche observed that few of his contemporaries seemed to comprehend the full implications of the death of God—the fact that “belief in the Christian God has ceased to be believable.” But once that belief was undermined, all that was built upon it would inevitably collapse, notably “our whole European morality.” Morality “has truth only if God is the truth—it stands or falls with faith in God.” For Eliot and the English “morality is not yet a problem” only for want of discernment.

Of course, for Nietzsche, God’s death was actually a glad tiding. “The consequences for us are…not at all sad and dark.” “We philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel as if a new dawn were shining on us when we receive the news that “the old god is dead”; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, anticipation, expectation.”
In denying God, Nietzsche thought, “we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world.”

Others have agreed with Nietzsche’s insistence that God’s death precipitates the demise of morality. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, was “strongly opposed to a certain kind of secular ethics which would like to abolish God with the least possible expense,”
seeks the source of morality apriori in a “heaven of ideas,” and gives assurances that “nothing will be changed if God does not exist.” But if Nietzsche read God’s obituary with a heart full of gratitude, Sartre’s initial reaction was one of “forlornness,” “distress,” and “vexation.”

"The existentialist, on the contrary, thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be an a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it."

Sartre describes his philosophy of existentialism as “nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position.” Chief among such consequences is the realization that, for humans, “existence precedes essence.” If God exists, then the reverse is true: essence precedes existence. This is to say that there is an essence or nature of humanity that resides in the mind of God prior to creating. He created us with a purpose or function. We were made for something, and we live well, or flourish, insofar as we live in accordance with that design plan, or bring our existence into harmony with our essence. But if there is no God, if, as Bertrand Russell would have it, “man is a product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving,” then, according to Sartre, “first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene,” and then it is up to each individual to determine his own “essence” or establish for himself what it is for him to flourish or live well. There exists no blueprint for the development of human nature prior to the one that each draws up for himself. At one point, Sartre does not mince words: “If I've discarded God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values. You've got to take things as they are.” And he adds, “To say that we invent values means nothing else but this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else than the meaning that you choose.”

Whether Sartre or anyone else finds sanctuary in such an edifice of hand-hewn values is largely a question of human psychology. Whether his “atheistic position” is, indeed, coherent, as he supposed, is among the topics to be addressed in the pages to follow. For present purposes, it is enough to observe Sartre’s substantial agreement with Nietzsche: if God does not exist then there are altogether no moral facts. And whether Nietzsche and Sartre are together correct or incorrect, the inference seems a natural one to many. The above quote from Bertrand Russell is but the opening to his famous declaration of naturalistic faith.

"That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

One might indeed wonder where there is room for moral facts in the sort of world that Russell describes. We humans are an unintended, late-arriving, soon-to-depart species, whose noblest thoughts and highest aspirations are “but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms,” and whatever we manage to accomplish during our brief tenure here will come to naught. This “strange mystery”—that there should ever have emerged conscious beings such as ourselves—will draw to a close, and Nature will resume her “secular hurryings” unobserved and without remark from the likes of us. Why, indeed, should anyone who professes such a naturalist creed suppose that human values are ultimate in any sense? Is there not a seamless move from the naturalism of Russell to the nihilism of Nietzsche?

Interestingly, in that essay of 1903, Russell himself does not draw those desperate conclusions. While he speaks of an “unyielding despair” that must be embraced, it provides the very foundation upon which a safe habitation may be built. The despair of which he speaks amounts to the abandonment of the search for a divine purpose back of the world, a providence at work within it, or our preservation beyond it. It is, he writes later in the essay, the recognition that “the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them.” But he adds, “It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes.” Like Eliot, Russell acknowledges that we face an “endless night.” But unlike Sartre or Nietzsche, Russell thinks, in “A Free Man’s Worship,” that the “heaven of ideas” is furnished though vacant.

Unlike “omnipotent matter,” which is “blind to good and evil,” man is graced with knowledge of both, and may “feel the demands of the ideal.” The soul’s habitation of which he speaks proves to be a “temple for the worship of our own ideals”—a worship of the Good and a respect for “the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments.” Over against Nietzsche in particular, Russell affirmed the need to “maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe.”

But a quarter of a century later, in a preface to a collection of his essays that included “A Free Man’s Worship,” Russell indicated that he had since recanted. That essay and another early one “depend upon a metaphysics which is more platonic that that which I now believe in,” he explained. “I no longer regard good and evil as objective entities wholly independent of human desires.” Russell credits his conversion to George Santayana’s critique of his earlier views in the latter’s Winds of Doctrine, and his language echoes Santayana’s own insistence that, “It is in reference to [our] constitutional interests that things are "really" good or bad.”

Santayana complains that Russell’s moral philosophy is “monocular” in its emphasis upon a “purified” ethical attitude. “We need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full image of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that perceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is moral.” He denies that the “ethical attitude” has the ethical ground that Russell assumes, but it assuredly has a natural ground. “The observer of the animate creation need not have much difficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell, however, refuses to look also in that direction.” The direction that Santayana has in mind is a “glance back over the shoulder” allowing one to see “how our moral bias is conditioned, and what basis it has in the physical order of things.” Russell ends up giving morality a “false place,” with “too loud an emphasis,” and this comes of failing to see “what is animal and fundamental in it.” Instead of recognizing the conditional and relative nature of our moral judgments, owing to their natural causes, Russell has, in those earlier writings, maintained that "Good and bad . . . are qualities which belong to objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and square do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good, only one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is right." This was Russell’s way of affirming what today is known as moral realism, with its view that moral facts are “stance independent.” Santayana found such an assertion to be incredible, yielding dogmatism and a “twang of intolerance” unworthy of the philosopher.

"For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating than coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a strange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to insist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference to any animal; that it is pervaded, as it were, by an inherent intoxication, and stands dead drunk in its bottle! Yet just in this way Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead bad. It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders reasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires, and false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point of reference or criterion is available to prove them such. If no point of reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing but physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force than to another. The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not in philosophy."

Just as the intoxicating effects of Scotch presuppose something regarding the physiological constitution of the drinker (After all, perhaps it produces lucidity in Martians), so is the acceptance of any particular moral value contingent upon the psychological disposition of the person. And that disposition is the effect of causes that would seem themselves to be morally indifferent. Santayana is thus unimpressed by Russell’s frequent appeals to wide assent in order to justify his various moral judgments. As he puts it, “the man who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of man.”

Before Santayana, Nietzsche had complained that such appeals to what may be called “considered moral judgments” betrayed intellectual dishonesty, as they “consider ‘beautiful sentiments’ adequate arguments, regarding a heaving bosom as the bellows of the deity, and conviction a criterion of truth.” Both Santayana and Nietzsche regard conviction by itself—even if widespread—to be of little more than psychological interest.

Thus, Russell “thinks he triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals, supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to recognise was independent of their constitution.”

This “independence” of the good, on Russell’s scheme, was a particular sticking point for Santayana. In short, Santayana argued that Russell’s Platonism—his idealism in ethics—belied his naturalism. Russell—together with Moore—had attempted to draw on one feature of Plato’s view, while disregarding others that were essential to the coherence of the whole. Not the least of these was the original theological element. Santayana suggests, “Plato would not have been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.” His point is that both the Platonic and Christian views, while locating the Good in a transcendent realm, nevertheless had the metaphysical grounds for asserting its influence in the natural world. “If the good were independent of nature, it might still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates; his good is not a power.” Russell’s ideal world is unequally yoked to his accidental world. The result of combining them is an odd and “paradoxical” view—“metaphysically queer,” perhaps.

"If I understand it, it may be expressed as follows: In the realm of eternal essences, before anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable property, that they ought to exist, or at least that, if anything exists, it ought to conform to them. What exists, however, is deaf to this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason…."

If indeed “man is a product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving,” if his beliefs are but the outcome of “accidental collocations of atoms,” then it is a strange mystery indeed that the world has in any way conformed itself to the heavenly imperative. Even supposing that there is such a heaven of ideas, there would seem to be a great gulf fixed between heavenly values and earthly facts. Russell’s hypostasized Good is “an impotent dogmatism on high”; his philosophy is a “ghost of Calvinism,” but the deity has none of the creative or punitive functions of Calvin’s God. The natural world is ordered according to the exigencies of physical law, but is quite deaf to the decrees of heaven. Russell affirms a heaven of ideas only because he has identified certain human ideals, which have their origin in the natural and animal world, and “projected them into the empyrean.”

Thus, both Nietzsche and Santayana, each in his manner, argued that the belief in the objectivity of moral values is a part of a larger metaphysical framework—the metaphysics of theism. To wrest that belief from its original and cobble it with the commitments of naturalism results in an impossible—or, at least, unnatural and griffinesque—amalgam. Santayana’s critique in particular seems to have hit its mark with Russell himself. Winds of Doctrine appeared in 1913. By 1918, Russell wrote that he was no longer certain of the objectivity of good and evil. Eleven years later, he had made shipwreck of his faith in moral ideals, having seen it driven to ruin by Santayana’s Winds.

________________

My Opie impression: circa 1963.

Wasn't Santaana the Mexican General who kilt Davy Crockett?

Come on you believe in a higher power don't you? First, even though bad things happen, men have what we call free will. Being a Christian, I have free will- meaning I choose what I do- my choices first of all I answer to The One God for my actions, if you don't believe in God you don't have to answer to anyone.

Believe me, the guys that flew the plans into the towers did believe in Allah, which in there country is God, it was sad what they thought would happen after they flew them into the towers and died. Sorry, friend it breaks my heart they were brain washed, deceived.

Christians have a code of morals, even though some may differ from time to time, like abortion, death penalty, war, etc. But believeing different on these subjects does not make us not a Christian. I go to church with people who are my demonation, love God but believe different on some of these things.

I don't see why anyone would even care about morals if you did not believe have to answer to someone. If we do this and anything goes- we are in a heap of trouble.

You know me, I like you, I think the best of you and I think your great, hey I call you friend. I see something in you that draws me to you and I can't figure it out- weird huh? But I will figure it out, your different and willing to listen and hear- just still be my friend, that would break my heart. Even if we don't believe the same. Simply because I see value, God's worth in you,- and you know what your searching and I am praying you find and accept the correct answer.

You know what my Mom and Sister have passed away, I missed them dearly, my Mom honestly made me who I am, I care about people. Honestly if I did not believe in "God" I could not continue in life, what we live and die and then what. My hope is God- He has a future for me, that's how I go on. Honestly, if I did not believe that I may not be here- the pain of their death was unbearable- first I loved my husband and son but even with that I could have given up-I am still here because of my belief in the bible.

Muddle knows the correct answer- I know.

Still friends!

Naturalism is generally understood as the view that reality is exhausted by the kinds of things that are (and are potentially) studied by the physical sciences. Thus, there is no God and there is no soul. It is the view so eloquently expressed by Bertrand Russell in "A Free Man's Worship":

"That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

It is a view shared by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and a number of people whose views I engage in my overlong essay posted in the other blog.

It is hard to see how we could ascribe moral agency to any known non-human animals (unless there are things that, say, the dolphins aren't telling us). I've nothing riding on this, really, but it seems that animals are capable only of behaving, whereas humans are capable also of acting. Obviously, I use "acting" in a special way here. It is behavior that is principled, and this seems to require both rational and moral autonomy.

I give an example in the essay of the social hierarchy that exists among wolves. Wolves come equipped with "social instincts," and a pack can function harmoniously so long as those instincts prevail. But it would be a stretch to say that the wolves get along from a sense of duty or the like.

Our common language reflects this. We might say that a human who kills another human has committed "murder." But the word does not extend to cases in which, say, wild animals kill humans or other animals. And the reason is that the moral dimension involved in the notion of "murder" seems to call for some degree of moral agency that presumably is not possessed by grizzly bears or tigers.

On the issue of free will, it is questionable whether the naturalist has room in his worldview for any significant notion of free will. COnsider, for example, Owen Flanagan's interesting book, The Problem of the Soul. Flanagan's thesis is that two common beliefs are false (but that it ultimately doesn't matter that they are false): the idea of the soul as an immaterial mind, and the idea of free will.

Naturalism is not identical to physicalism (conceptually, that is), but you would be hard-pressed to find a naturalist who is not a physicalist. And it is very difficult to see how the physicalist can avoid a thoroughgoing determinism. On physicalism, whatever thoughts are occurring in your brain right now are either identical to or the inevitable result of whatever physical state your brain happens to be in. But there is a deterministic explanation for the physical state of your brain. And so it looks as though there is a deterministic explanation for whatever thoughts you are having. (And of course this extends to all of your behaviors as well.) To allow free will in the traditional sense of the term, is to allow that the universe is open to causes that are not a part of the mechanistic causal nexus. A truly free action would be not unlike a miracle in the sense that it would involve a breaking in from the outside and the introduction of a chain of events not already programmed in, so to speak.

As far as the human abuse of moral freedom goes (in contrast to that of animals), consider this passage from The Brothers Karamazov:

"People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, -too; cutting the unborn child from the mothers womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mothers' eyes. Doing it before the mothers' eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion: they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say."

If B&N doesn't have the Midgley book, check Amazon used. (I love buying from Amazon. It's like Christmas when the UPS truck comes rumbling up with a package of books!)

________________

My Opie impression: circa 1963.

Your argument, that moral realism requires a particular sort of metaphysical and underpinning in order to be coherent seems flawed. However you extend it and narrow it so that, by definition, it cannot be effectively argued against when you say, “The argument, then, is that theism has the resources for providing a metaphysical and epistemological account that is unavailable to the consistent naturalist.”

The consistent naturalist does not attempt to find the metaphysical explanations of the features of reality that exist beyond the physical world and immediate senses, quite the contraire. You have put naturalist in the same position as demanding of a theist to prove the existence of God using only physical proofs which can be scientifically identified and studied.

I could contend that what you perceive as morality is behavior resulting from the natural product of evolutionary natural selection favoring harmonious coexistence within and across species.

If you would stipulate that animals (besides humans) are neither moral nor immoral, can you give an example of a moral truth that does not have a counterpart manifested in the non-human animal kingdom?

There is no demand here for the naturalist to look for metaphysical resources "that exist beyond the physical world and immediate senses."
That would be to beg the question.

Naturalism/physicalism IS a competing view in metaphysics. The demand is to show how thre naturalist/physicalist has the metaphysical and epistemological resources WITHIN his worldview for making sense of the objectivity of morality.

(It is precisely the same sort of question as the following: "Is there a coherent physicalist account of consciousness?" This is a lively topic that, contrary to the probable expectations of our friend Josh, is not raised only by people out to defend the existence of God or the soul. COlin McGinn, for instance, who is a physicalist, recognizes the challenge. He asks, "How do we explain how technicolor phenomena can arise out of soggy gray matter?" People like Dan Dennett (my favorite atheist) have taken up such challenges. His splendid Darwin's Dangerous Idea is a book-length attempt to show that you can explain everything that calls for explanation on evolutionary naturalism. As you know, I disagree, but this does not mean that it is not a spectacular effort.) If the mind-body dualist comes along with his challenge to the physicalist, he is not making a demand parallel to the one you thought I was making, insisting that the naturalist seek metaphysical grounds that transcend the physical world. If physicalism is true, then there aren't such things.)

To switch examples, it is like asking whether a brilliant engineer can building a working aircraft or a computer when the only building materials he has are a giant slab of cream cheese. (Well, maybe it isn't like this, but it's funny to think about.)

I'm puzzled that you would ever have thought otherwise. You seem to persist in trying to interpret my argument along implausible lines and then to reply to that interpretation.

I could contend that what you perceive as morality is behavior resulting from the natural product of evolutionary natural selection favoring harmonious coexistence within and across species.

Yes, Jeff, you could (though I read you to be denying such a thing in your initial reply to my other blog). That is certainly a way of resisting the claim that theism provides a better account of moral phenomena. But I could reply (and this is the WHOLE POINT) of my argument, that IF that is what it is, then we've no reason whatsoever to think that the world is populated by objective moral properties. More likely, WIlson and Ruse are right: "Ethics is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." (My larger essay takes varieties of moral skepticism into account. You should read Russ Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence on this topic. One of the many paragraphs in the posted essay that you didn't read takes note of the fact that there are evolutionary naturalists who simply reject the premise of moral realism. I set this aside and say that I am concerned about those evolutionary naturalists who wish to embrace moral realism.)

My conclusion is conditional: Insofar as we take the "moral sense" to discern objective moral properties (so that we may say (a) Rape is wrong and (b) it's "wrongness" is in no way mind-dependent), then we have reason to reject the evolutikonary account (called for by naturalism).

My claim is that animals are not morally autonomous, and therefore not moral agents, and this is why what they do is not the proper subject of moral praise or blame ("Nice doggy" is not moral praise).

I'm not sure why you demand the example. But here are some of what you ask for:

"Act only on that maxim that you can at the same time will to become a universal law." (Do you think animals act on "maxims" at all?)

"Always treat humanity [fill in with "equinity" or "bovinity" or whatever is appropriate to the species you have in mind] as an end-in-itself and never merely as a means to an end." (Is it likely that "altruism" among non-human animals is out of a regard for the inherent worth of the other? On this and similar topics, see Richard Joyce, The EVolution of Morality,--particularly his discussion of the way in which "altruism" is misused as applied to animals. See also Elliot Sober and David SLoan Wilson, Unto Others.

Ah, and as Dennett says, given naturalism/evolution, the notion of natural rights is "nonsense on stilts." Right there, you have theadmission that the worldview and the science that is endorsed must give up on at least one seemingly important ("on stilts") piece of the moral puzzle. There are no observed rights in the animal kingdom. Even if the animal rights people like Tom Regan are correct in according rights to rabbits, foxes will hear nothing of it.

Here's another:

"Love your enemies and bless those who would persecute you." (James Rachels in Created From Animals: The Moral Implication of Darwinism notes that any so-called, "Grand, Sermon-on-the-Mount" variety of altruism is extremely unlikely given Darwin's theory and should be regarded as a "variation." (Mother Theresa turns out to be something of a mutant.) He's right. If we are looking to the animals for examples, the best cases of "altruism" that we are likely to find are "kin altruism" and "reciprocal altruism." If Rachels is right, then trying to teach people to love their enemies is like trying to teach cats to bark.

And another:

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (this is not reducible to the tit-for-tat that we find among monkeys (you pick my lice and I'll pick yours).

________________

My Opie impression: circa 1963.

Doesn't seem like a nice, light holiday read. Maybe I'll open that one up in the dark days of February.

Ever read "The Brothers K" by David James Duncan? I really enjoyed it but having never read Karamazov I wonder if there are many (any) similarities.

Got any good book recommendations for the holiday break?

By the way, your CDs are here - I think my blog yesterday might have got bumped off before you saw it.

Here's a relatively unknown work that comes to mind:

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat.

This is a hilarious (late Victorian) account of three friends (and a dog named Montmorency) sculling up the Thames from London. My daughter gave this to me last Christmas. I had never heard of Jerome, but read--and immensely enjoyed--it over the holidays. Great passages about various mishaps, including a classic scene of a group of people getting utterly lost in a hedge maze. I think you can find the text online. Yes, just here.

Otherwise, are you familiar with P.G. Wodehouse and the "Jeeves" books? I think Wodehouse was a Jerome K. Jerome fan. Funny stuff there, too.

More recently, the stuff by Alexander McCall Smith (Portugese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, etc., are a riot.

CDs? Really? The normal procedure is to trade, and I have none to offer.

_______________

My Opie impression: circa 1963.

Thanks for the book ideas - no worries about the cds - 'tis better to give than it is to receive.