Materialist morality and more
I have encountered positions like Nathanael’s many times. Though I have developed something of a psychological callus on the subject by now, it never ceases to dismay me when I hear it issuing from someone thoughtful. But it’s such a fundamental subject, the foundation of everything that matters, and it cuts directly at the heart of every morally engaged human - when I pronounce Christ’s morality lacking or flawed, I can only expect we’re about to talk about the primordial truths, the convictions that drive our inspirations, give us place, fortify confidence in our own values, and guide us to lasting happiness.
To start at the beginning I have to start at the end of Nathanael’s essay, in which he seems to misunderstand Popper’s principle of disconfirmability as the undergirding of empiricism. We’ve discussed this before, in which Nathanael opined that science’s assumption of naturalism amounted to faith. I offered up Popper as an antidote to that, with his description of how what philosophers once described as “induction” is actually the result of deduction in an asymmetrical propositional environment. Nathanael and others (appear to) have interpreted this to mean that scientific method is no more or less arbitrary in its precepts than any other system of investigation, but it’s really intended to show that one need make no arbitrary assumptions to choose the kinds of hypotheses that are deductively tractable and thereby worth making - naturalistic ones. Now, perhaps Popper is wrong, but the key is that one must respond to Popper (and others) in that context if one wants to continue to insist that scientific empiricism is just another faith. One can’t stop with, for example, Hume’s refutation of the forms of inductive principle that existed in his time.
Moving on backwards through Nathanael’s essay, I come to his claim that scientists and philosophers have no credible account of how humans think:
I get the feeling that Nathanael has not read any of the many answers that scientists have advanced, the models that have grown dramatically in power and fidelity in the last twenty years since the overly-reductive red herring of hard computationalism finally fell by the wayside for good. It’s gotten to the point where Jeffrey Chalmers is acting as a sort of Horatio on the Bridge of Dualism, his “The Conscious Mind” remarkable almost as much for how much it concedes as what it preserves of dualism. He concedes that all functional cognitive processes can be and are achieved in a traditional mechanistic manner and only invokes “naturalistic dualism” as the final province of ineffable phenomenal experience. Even this predicates on his claim that philosophers have not (yet) given an account that describes phenomenal experiences as constituent to functional description.
However, such accounts have been given, and Chalmers is flat mistaken on that point. There are a number of accounts in the marketplace, no one of which is likely to be the complete right answer, but these various models of how to constitute semantic processing in syntactic terms while taking the introspectively familiar non-semantic depths to cogitation seriously (including those aspects historically called ‘phenomenal’) have grown through theoretical critique and input from clinical neurology until they are plausible and occasionally even persuasive. An incredible amount of work remains to match the models to minds, but we’re not nowhere any more. One reason for confidence on this score is the huge strides we’ve taken in understanding perception beyond the “homunculus watching the screen” non-model. For a rapidly aging but nonetheless accessible and eye-opening account, read the late Francis Crick’s “Astonishing Hypothesis,” in which he present the then state-of-the-art understanding of the human visual perception system. Even then we were well beyond handwaving about how it is that we package and process visual concepts, even down to a surprisingly fine grain. Only a decade previously, rampant skepticism that we would ever understand anything as close to semantic processing as human perception held a great deal of currency. By the early 90s when Crick published his book, the situation reversed entirely, with some assuming we’d understand everything about the brain/mind soon. Crick himself remained far more cautious, seeing from a lab’s-eye view the huge job left to do in working out how a gaggle of moderately well-described perceptual subsystems could add up to the flexible, apparently infinite semantic flexibility we observe in the human mind.
In many ways Patricia Smith Churchland’s “Neurophilosophy” heralded the modern, more neurophysically-grounded era of cognitive philosophy. Dennett’s presumptuously-named “Consciousness Explained” redefined the discussion by showing how to obviate a number of apparently insoluble explanatory conundrums through a more clever framing of hypothesis. His heterophenomenological method, growing out of the arguments in his influential book “The Intentional Stance” and applied comprehensively in “Consciousness Explained” helps avoid unnecessary assumptions that grow out of inappropriately applied “folk psychology,” as Paul Churchland calls the common models of mind we use to predict peoples’ thoughts and feelings on a day-to-day basis. In the intervening 13 years, Kathleen Akins, Bo Dahlbom, V M Ramachandran, the Churchlands, and countless others have carried forward in both science and philosophy, the articles and books becoming more and more focused as the ratio of hypothesis to evidence rapidly improved. In 2004, materialism might require a lot of hard work and research, but it does not require “a colossal leap of blind faith.”
But one need not get so deeply into the nuts and bolts of modern analytical philosophy in conjunction with its new partner experimental science to present a simplified counterpoint to Nathanael’s ideas about the incorporeal nature of thought:
It can be rhetorically dangerous to compare human cognition to computer processing of the sort familiar at this point in history. The human mind is (to the connectionist theorists who now dominate the field) certainly the result of something expressible as an Von Neumann machine and thus at least potentially portable to some future computer with sufficient memory and processing speed. Nonetheless, the informational topology of computer programs that exist today and that of the vastly more advanced human brain are not similar and human minds are not just more advanced elaborations on Microsoft Windows. All that said, computers can instantiate abstract processing, if not int eh contextually-rich manner human brains do.
When a computer moves electrons around to calculate 2+2=4, there’s no Platonic “two” or “four” made physical in the computer; all that has occurred is the modeling of logical relationships using physical processes. Nonetheless, the calculation got done, and the logic of 2+2=4 has been successfully reflected in the material world. When huge neural associations cooperatively reflect the same logic, the mind of which these calculations are a part has “thought” of this immaterial mathematical relationship. The results of such neural processing gets sent around to other subsystems that process the result in their own idiosyncratic way, evoking, for example, memories related to this much-used logical statement, its implications, and even how it “feels” to us. Thousands of ganglia undertaking their division of labor call up a bewildering variety of descriptors concerning mountains (appearance and spatial characteristics form the visual system, relevant words from the linguistic, smells from the olfactory, and so on) to present to the relevant adjacent ganglia for further processing, it all adding up to conscious consideration. A subset of these present their findings to the generative portions of our linguistic system to shape the linguistic thoughts we think to ourselves (or type into our blogs), another subset’s findings shape the visualizations we visualize to ourselves (or attempt to draw), and so on.
Though this description is necessarily short of detail, it sketches a view of how thoughts get thought through physical reflection of logical relationships. Logical relationships are and will always be immaterial in nature, but minds are immaterial too; they are the network of logical relationships reflected by electrochemical signals of the physical brain, and someday (I believe) by the movement of electrons in futuristic computer hardware.
Next we have this paragraph in which Nathanael correctly notes that any system that denies freewill cannot justify any morality:
Nathanael’s objections about materialist freewill result from a badly-chosen conceptualization or definition of freewill that needs an answer in much greater length and detail than I can offer here, but I can strip the compatiblist position of all its argument and just state that freewill is properly the opposite of coercion and determinism is the opposite of indeterminism. The idea that naturalistic determinism threatens freewill is almost backwards - only indeterminism could threaten freewill by potentially removing causation from moral decisions.* Insisting on choice as the uncaused cause is just a terrible idea, rendering all accounts of responsibility incoherent.
Religious positions may appear at first glance to escape this by making the immaterial soul guide moral decision-making, but this simply moves explanation into the realm of handwaving or brackets it entirely. As soon as I ask why a soul comes to make the choices it does, the prospect of pointless infinite regression looms. Perhaps someone can offer mechanisms for how the soul arrives at moral decisions, but then we’re back to a determined, mechanistic explanation, even if it’s a different substance instantiating the mechanism.
Compatibilism, on the other hand, seems to me to be the only way to save freewill (at least, a form of freewill worth wanting) and thus allow a non question-begging moral system. Since materialist compatibilism is simpler than dualist compatibilism, Occam’s much-invoked Razor invites me to chose the former.
With that, I move further backwards to Nathanael’s offer of quarter to an undefeated enemy:
It tends to be very difficult (sometimes impossible?) to prove that anything is impossible in a way that ends argument, but it’s certainly reasonable to assume something impossible if no one can come up with a plausible account of its possibility. It is incumbent on those advancing an argument to support an idea’s possibility/probability since you can’t prove a negative. Disproving a claim involves disassembling the offered support thereof, like demolishing a building involves destroying its structure. A building doesn’t count as standing just because the plot hasn’t been rendered permanently unusable and some other structure may yet be built there.
On the other hand, being convinced one has flattened a highrise doesn’t suffice to make it so. “First Things” is hardly an unbiased journal of analytical philosophy. While I do not peruse it on anything approaching a regular basis, I have read a handful of articles therefrom over the years and haven’t found myself particularly moved by the admittedly sophisticated apologetics advanced. Neither am I unbiased, so those articles’ failure to persuade me hardly amounts to a searing indictment of the consensus amongst contributors to First Things, but it does raise the prospect that a competing consensus or two might be found elsewhere. The hordes (ha ha!) of materialist analytical ethical philosophers (who, yes, still exist despite the attempts of post-modernist “philosophers” to squeeze them out of the humanities departments) who argue about their latest refinements and corrections to systems of materialist morality certainly believe they have a pretty good shot at arriving at ever-better justifications for human values without reference to anything supernatural. I tend to think theologians are in a poor position to declare victory over materialist ethics. At least one philosopher of science, Michael Martin, chose that field because he felt that the theological positions had been so thoroughly crushed in the academic arena that there was no interesting work left to do and the only people left talking about it were a cabal of professional theologians whose jobs depended on the pretense that rational theology was still viable. It’s a sort of mirror image to Nathanael’s position. Of course, the theologians declined to give up and continued to refine Kierkegaard, Lewis, and etc, so said philosopher returned to “refute” these newer refinements with his book "Atheism: A Philosophical Justification." Did he do so? I think so, but I don’t even claim omniscience and no one’s invented a refutometer to measure that objectively. It’s up to us humans to arrive at our own decisions. Notably those theologians still haven’t retired in embarrassed disrepute.
My ongoing retrograde progression through Nathanael’s essay skips several paragraphs at this point to his claims of events in human history discrediting the enlightenment moral philosophies:
The most parsimonious return volley here is to ask how often actions taken in the name of and ostensibly directed by Christian teachings have turned out to be awful moral catastrophes. The Crusades are a much-ballyhooed member of that vast set (and frequently overstated), but I would also like to point out that people have attempted to justify monarchy, slavery, female thralldom, numerous wars, and even, yes, Naziism in Christian terms. At least frequently these involved distorted simplifications of Christian theology and biblical reasoning, but nonetheless, the people doing the arguing presumably considered themselves to be faithful to Christian truth.
I put my intended opposition to Nathanael’s conclusion more plainly: Soviet socialism is at best a misapplication of utilitarian principles and I reject the claim Immanuel Kant has more connection with Naziism than does Jesus Christ. Nathanael does, however, demonstrate how demagogues can repackage and repurpose originally subtle positions to serve their own ends. Surely a tolerably literate Christian will notice the wide divide between the rousing but sophistic speeches usually offered to the parishioners in the hinterlands and the intricate, carefully crafted arguments gracing the pages of academic theological journals.
In the preceding paragraph Nathanael equates the highlights of Enlightenment moral philosophy with Christian teachings:
To construe “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as a mere translation of Christian charity is to help oneself to an astonishing amount. How is Christian charity any more equivalent to that than Muslim charity, or Buddhist charity, or the charity encouraged by Native American beliefs, or the charity urged by myriad other native traditions, ancient philosophers, and so on? Charity seems to be a widespread value in general human culture. Further, I don’t see how “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” much less the rest of Bentham’s utilitarianism, is equivalent to the idea of charity at all. Utilitarian reasoning in the form of that statement can militate for or against charity in a given analysis of a particular situation, and of course the far subtler modifications of/diversions from the tradition that Bentham started take more words to express than exist in the whole of the Bible.
I hardly know what to say about Kant supposedly translating the golden rule. I suppose one could regard the golden rule as consonant with Kant’s philosophy, but “treat others as you would wish to be treated” is mostly an elegantly-phrased exhortation to be nice with many snappily-put analogues from a plethora of cultures. I can’t figure out any way to meaningfully reduce Kant’s ethical philosophy to an argument for being nice.
Now, it’s true that it helped Enlightenment philosophy that its various ethical systems didn’t demand dramatic departures from European moral intuition, informed as it was by its Christian tradition, but the works of those philosophers and their modern counterparts are not exactly unread and unfollowed in, say, Japan, which has no Christian tradition to speak of.
Finally we arrive at the substantive beginning of Nathanael’s essay:
The first sentence of that quote is an allusion to my statement:
I am highly skeptical of the ability of finite humans to achieve a complete and flawless moral system, my belief in the ongoing (fitful) improvement of both theoretical and practical morality notwithstanding. Nathanael’s casual assertion that modern moral philosophers’ arguments have been “refuted”, however, may just possibly require more support than his bald asseveration. MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”, presumably the modern source of Nathanael’s belief that ethical philosophy has proven hopeless (and which also focused inordinately on Nietzsche as the father of modern ethics), is certainly a powerful, clever book but not only is MacIntyre’s position highly contentious (and does not address Dennett’s position, to which I subscribe), I think Nathanael has gone a bit beyond even MacIntyre. Certainly I welcome more discussion of the flaws and virtues of particular ethical theories to explore our respective beliefs.
As for Nathanael’s hypothesis regarding the reasons professional philosophers continue to publicly hold Kant and general ethical philosophy in good regard, one could easily turn the same logic against theologians, a tack I have mentioned but dismissed as unfair in previous essays. I doubt Nathanael intends to offer such an ad-hominem type argument seriously anyway.
Finally, I must respond to the public’s supposed “unpersuaded-ness.” If we measure the public’s interest in moral philosophy by its references to Christ versus Kant or Mill, the existence of a large, well-funded, 2000-year-old Christian church (in its various incarnations) gives Christ a distinctive advantage. Philosophy departments do have their own pedagogical heft, but they hardly outweigh seminary schools nor do very many recipients of degrees in philosophy go on establish large weekly social groups devoted to advocating their favored school of thought. A handful do go on to earn doctorates and a proportion of those end up teaching philosophy, but this represents a vanishingly small cadre compared to their theological competition. Given such a large demagogic lead, it would actually seem like the relative pervasiveness of explicit invocation of Enlightenment moral philosophy requires explanation. I can offer a number of hypotheses that don’t require the philosophies in question be any more attractive or persuasive than religious alternatives, but I think that’s sufficient to cast doubt on the ascription of Christianity’s powerful share in the marketplace of ideas to its more persuasive content.
I could also argue that many Enlightenment moral ideas have won so completely that they are now the status-quo, obscuring the link between modern intuitions about moral calculus and these theories that are no longer novel. Advancing that position, however, would require a lot of careful study and analysis that I’m ill-equipped to undertake. Likely the idea has been suggested, defined, criticized and defended already by trained professionals, but as I’ve not encountered such a dialog, I hold only a very weak preliminary opinion on its sustainability.
And so at the end of a little shy of 4000 words I arrive at my conclusion that Nathanael’s perception of what is “obvious” about the weakness of materialism and the prospects of materialist ethics is at least as dubious as my ill-chosen claim that tradition “OBVIOUSLY cuts ZERO ice.” At this point I want to leave attempts at objective analysis aside for a moment and turn to a poem I wrote a while back that expresses my feelings about evangelism of secular, materialist morality. I’m not much of a poet, but perhaps sometimes the spiritual side of one’s deep convictions is best evoked by poetical language.
I have nothing to offer you
No easy answers
No freedom from toil
No way to set your conscience to rest
In three easy steps
If you buy my product I can guarantee you
Only hard work
Only uncertainty
Only a long hard fight to give people what they already own
But don't want
I can't offer you the stars or the moon
Everything I give you will be the sweat of your own brow
I have nothing to offer you
Except freedom
*For a popular but confused attempt by an eminent theoretical physicist to make room for his “uncaused” conception of freewill via quantum calculations, see Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind.” Though quite brilliant, Penrose’s approach to consciousness suffers fatally from a lack of appreciation of heuristic algorithms - not particularly surprising in a physicist but nonetheless crippling in someone addressing cognitive science.
To start at the beginning I have to start at the end of Nathanael’s essay, in which he seems to misunderstand Popper’s principle of disconfirmability as the undergirding of empiricism. We’ve discussed this before, in which Nathanael opined that science’s assumption of naturalism amounted to faith. I offered up Popper as an antidote to that, with his description of how what philosophers once described as “induction” is actually the result of deduction in an asymmetrical propositional environment. Nathanael and others (appear to) have interpreted this to mean that scientific method is no more or less arbitrary in its precepts than any other system of investigation, but it’s really intended to show that one need make no arbitrary assumptions to choose the kinds of hypotheses that are deductively tractable and thereby worth making - naturalistic ones. Now, perhaps Popper is wrong, but the key is that one must respond to Popper (and others) in that context if one wants to continue to insist that scientific empiricism is just another faith. One can’t stop with, for example, Hume’s refutation of the forms of inductive principle that existed in his time.
Moving on backwards through Nathanael’s essay, I come to his claim that scientists and philosophers have no credible account of how humans think:
This whole complex of thoughts, abstract ideas, right and wrong and free will, materialists must somehow explain with reference only to electrical signals bouncing around among neurons. Have they accomplished this? Of course not, not even close. To the question, "If the world is strictly material, then how do we think, and how are our thoughts linked to things in the physical world that we're thinking of, and how can we think abstract thoughts that are not equivalent to anything in real life, and how can ideas be communicated, such that the 'same idea' can exist in two different heads, and if we can make choices, as we seem to be able to do, how can we do that?" the answer is "Somehow." (Perhaps more fancily worded.) Materialism demands a colossal leap of blind faith.
I get the feeling that Nathanael has not read any of the many answers that scientists have advanced, the models that have grown dramatically in power and fidelity in the last twenty years since the overly-reductive red herring of hard computationalism finally fell by the wayside for good. It’s gotten to the point where Jeffrey Chalmers is acting as a sort of Horatio on the Bridge of Dualism, his “The Conscious Mind” remarkable almost as much for how much it concedes as what it preserves of dualism. He concedes that all functional cognitive processes can be and are achieved in a traditional mechanistic manner and only invokes “naturalistic dualism” as the final province of ineffable phenomenal experience. Even this predicates on his claim that philosophers have not (yet) given an account that describes phenomenal experiences as constituent to functional description.
However, such accounts have been given, and Chalmers is flat mistaken on that point. There are a number of accounts in the marketplace, no one of which is likely to be the complete right answer, but these various models of how to constitute semantic processing in syntactic terms while taking the introspectively familiar non-semantic depths to cogitation seriously (including those aspects historically called ‘phenomenal’) have grown through theoretical critique and input from clinical neurology until they are plausible and occasionally even persuasive. An incredible amount of work remains to match the models to minds, but we’re not nowhere any more. One reason for confidence on this score is the huge strides we’ve taken in understanding perception beyond the “homunculus watching the screen” non-model. For a rapidly aging but nonetheless accessible and eye-opening account, read the late Francis Crick’s “Astonishing Hypothesis,” in which he present the then state-of-the-art understanding of the human visual perception system. Even then we were well beyond handwaving about how it is that we package and process visual concepts, even down to a surprisingly fine grain. Only a decade previously, rampant skepticism that we would ever understand anything as close to semantic processing as human perception held a great deal of currency. By the early 90s when Crick published his book, the situation reversed entirely, with some assuming we’d understand everything about the brain/mind soon. Crick himself remained far more cautious, seeing from a lab’s-eye view the huge job left to do in working out how a gaggle of moderately well-described perceptual subsystems could add up to the flexible, apparently infinite semantic flexibility we observe in the human mind.
In many ways Patricia Smith Churchland’s “Neurophilosophy” heralded the modern, more neurophysically-grounded era of cognitive philosophy. Dennett’s presumptuously-named “Consciousness Explained” redefined the discussion by showing how to obviate a number of apparently insoluble explanatory conundrums through a more clever framing of hypothesis. His heterophenomenological method, growing out of the arguments in his influential book “The Intentional Stance” and applied comprehensively in “Consciousness Explained” helps avoid unnecessary assumptions that grow out of inappropriately applied “folk psychology,” as Paul Churchland calls the common models of mind we use to predict peoples’ thoughts and feelings on a day-to-day basis. In the intervening 13 years, Kathleen Akins, Bo Dahlbom, V M Ramachandran, the Churchlands, and countless others have carried forward in both science and philosophy, the articles and books becoming more and more focused as the ratio of hypothesis to evidence rapidly improved. In 2004, materialism might require a lot of hard work and research, but it does not require “a colossal leap of blind faith.”
But one need not get so deeply into the nuts and bolts of modern analytical philosophy in conjunction with its new partner experimental science to present a simplified counterpoint to Nathanael’s ideas about the incorporeal nature of thought:
...to me materialism flies in the face of the most basic experiences. I have thoughts. I do not see any thoughts in the world around me. Thoughts are within me, and do not have the characteristics of material objects, such as size or shape. They have a certain connection to material objects, as we say "I'm thinking of a mountain." It's almost as if the mountain was in our heads, and we might even say that "I have the most beautiful scene in my head." But of course, the mountain isn't physically in our heads: it wouldn't fit. Another example: I can conceive of abstract things, such as 2+2=4, which, though they may be instantiated in the physical world, cannot exist in the physical world per se. Yet I can most certainly think them.
It can be rhetorically dangerous to compare human cognition to computer processing of the sort familiar at this point in history. The human mind is (to the connectionist theorists who now dominate the field) certainly the result of something expressible as an Von Neumann machine and thus at least potentially portable to some future computer with sufficient memory and processing speed. Nonetheless, the informational topology of computer programs that exist today and that of the vastly more advanced human brain are not similar and human minds are not just more advanced elaborations on Microsoft Windows. All that said, computers can instantiate abstract processing, if not int eh contextually-rich manner human brains do.
When a computer moves electrons around to calculate 2+2=4, there’s no Platonic “two” or “four” made physical in the computer; all that has occurred is the modeling of logical relationships using physical processes. Nonetheless, the calculation got done, and the logic of 2+2=4 has been successfully reflected in the material world. When huge neural associations cooperatively reflect the same logic, the mind of which these calculations are a part has “thought” of this immaterial mathematical relationship. The results of such neural processing gets sent around to other subsystems that process the result in their own idiosyncratic way, evoking, for example, memories related to this much-used logical statement, its implications, and even how it “feels” to us. Thousands of ganglia undertaking their division of labor call up a bewildering variety of descriptors concerning mountains (appearance and spatial characteristics form the visual system, relevant words from the linguistic, smells from the olfactory, and so on) to present to the relevant adjacent ganglia for further processing, it all adding up to conscious consideration. A subset of these present their findings to the generative portions of our linguistic system to shape the linguistic thoughts we think to ourselves (or type into our blogs), another subset’s findings shape the visualizations we visualize to ourselves (or attempt to draw), and so on.
Though this description is necessarily short of detail, it sketches a view of how thoughts get thought through physical reflection of logical relationships. Logical relationships are and will always be immaterial in nature, but minds are immaterial too; they are the network of logical relationships reflected by electrochemical signals of the physical brain, and someday (I believe) by the movement of electrons in futuristic computer hardware.
Next we have this paragraph in which Nathanael correctly notes that any system that denies freewill cannot justify any morality:
And yet, it just seems obvious a priori that there can be no morality for a materialist. Morality implies free will and choice, but for materialists those are illusions, we are all just particles bouncing around. If I stab someone with a knife, I am held guilty, and the knife is not, because the knife is just a material object with no volition of its own. But for the materialist, I too am just a material object with no volition of my own. Can I be guilty? Morality implies right and wrong, good and evil. But how can those metaphysical entities exist in a strictly material world? What could they mean? Not that these questions-- free will and choice, or good and evil-- are easy to answer in the framework of other metaphysical positions (e.g. body/spirit dualism) either; they are still quite difficult. But a materialist cuts himself off from all possible avenues of answering them from square one
Nathanael’s objections about materialist freewill result from a badly-chosen conceptualization or definition of freewill that needs an answer in much greater length and detail than I can offer here, but I can strip the compatiblist position of all its argument and just state that freewill is properly the opposite of coercion and determinism is the opposite of indeterminism. The idea that naturalistic determinism threatens freewill is almost backwards - only indeterminism could threaten freewill by potentially removing causation from moral decisions.* Insisting on choice as the uncaused cause is just a terrible idea, rendering all accounts of responsibility incoherent.
Religious positions may appear at first glance to escape this by making the immaterial soul guide moral decision-making, but this simply moves explanation into the realm of handwaving or brackets it entirely. As soon as I ask why a soul comes to make the choices it does, the prospect of pointless infinite regression looms. Perhaps someone can offer mechanisms for how the soul arrives at moral decisions, but then we’re back to a determined, mechanistic explanation, even if it’s a different substance instantiating the mechanism.
Compatibilism, on the other hand, seems to me to be the only way to save freewill (at least, a form of freewill worth wanting) and thus allow a non question-begging moral system. Since materialist compatibilism is simpler than dualist compatibilism, Occam’s much-invoked Razor invites me to chose the former.
With that, I move further backwards to Nathanael’s offer of quarter to an undefeated enemy:
It's hard to justify any morality in a materialist framework. In fact, I'm inclined to say it's impossible, which is what a lot of people have assuemd[my gratitude to Nathanael for offering a typo to make me feel a bit better about my far more numerous editing failures], and what is argued perennially in the pages of magazines like First Things-- and yet it seems like poor sportsmanship, somehow, to say that. That debate reminds me somehow of a parent is playing chess with a child, and no matter how many times the child is beaten he keeps saying bravely, "I challenge you to another match!" but the parent meanly refuses ever to let the child win.
It tends to be very difficult (sometimes impossible?) to prove that anything is impossible in a way that ends argument, but it’s certainly reasonable to assume something impossible if no one can come up with a plausible account of its possibility. It is incumbent on those advancing an argument to support an idea’s possibility/probability since you can’t prove a negative. Disproving a claim involves disassembling the offered support thereof, like demolishing a building involves destroying its structure. A building doesn’t count as standing just because the plot hasn’t been rendered permanently unusable and some other structure may yet be built there.
On the other hand, being convinced one has flattened a highrise doesn’t suffice to make it so. “First Things” is hardly an unbiased journal of analytical philosophy. While I do not peruse it on anything approaching a regular basis, I have read a handful of articles therefrom over the years and haven’t found myself particularly moved by the admittedly sophisticated apologetics advanced. Neither am I unbiased, so those articles’ failure to persuade me hardly amounts to a searing indictment of the consensus amongst contributors to First Things, but it does raise the prospect that a competing consensus or two might be found elsewhere. The hordes (ha ha!) of materialist analytical ethical philosophers (who, yes, still exist despite the attempts of post-modernist “philosophers” to squeeze them out of the humanities departments) who argue about their latest refinements and corrections to systems of materialist morality certainly believe they have a pretty good shot at arriving at ever-better justifications for human values without reference to anything supernatural. I tend to think theologians are in a poor position to declare victory over materialist ethics. At least one philosopher of science, Michael Martin, chose that field because he felt that the theological positions had been so thoroughly crushed in the academic arena that there was no interesting work left to do and the only people left talking about it were a cabal of professional theologians whose jobs depended on the pretense that rational theology was still viable. It’s a sort of mirror image to Nathanael’s position. Of course, the theologians declined to give up and continued to refine Kierkegaard, Lewis, and etc, so said philosopher returned to “refute” these newer refinements with his book "Atheism: A Philosophical Justification." Did he do so? I think so, but I don’t even claim omniscience and no one’s invented a refutometer to measure that objectively. It’s up to us humans to arrive at our own decisions. Notably those theologians still haven’t retired in embarrassed disrepute.
My ongoing retrograde progression through Nathanael’s essay skips several paragraphs at this point to his claims of events in human history discrediting the enlightenment moral philosophies:
When Enlightenment morality began to reach the masses in the late 19th century, the flaws and incompleteness that an intelligent person can rapidly recognize in reading Bentham or Kant were translated into social catastrophes. In the Soviet state, meddling in every detail of life and liquidating all opposition for the sake of the communist utopia in which the greatest happiness of the greatest number would come to pass, we see Bentham's errors writ large. In the Nazi soldier, braving death and suppressing all kind feeling for the sake of Fatherland and Fuehrer, never mind the consequences, we see Kant's categorical imperative discredited through being realized.
The most parsimonious return volley here is to ask how often actions taken in the name of and ostensibly directed by Christian teachings have turned out to be awful moral catastrophes. The Crusades are a much-ballyhooed member of that vast set (and frequently overstated), but I would also like to point out that people have attempted to justify monarchy, slavery, female thralldom, numerous wars, and even, yes, Naziism in Christian terms. At least frequently these involved distorted simplifications of Christian theology and biblical reasoning, but nonetheless, the people doing the arguing presumably considered themselves to be faithful to Christian truth.
I put my intended opposition to Nathanael’s conclusion more plainly: Soviet socialism is at best a misapplication of utilitarian principles and I reject the claim Immanuel Kant has more connection with Naziism than does Jesus Christ. Nathanael does, however, demonstrate how demagogues can repackage and repurpose originally subtle positions to serve their own ends. Surely a tolerably literate Christian will notice the wide divide between the rousing but sophistic speeches usually offered to the parishioners in the hinterlands and the intricate, carefully crafted arguments gracing the pages of academic theological journals.
In the preceding paragraph Nathanael equates the highlights of Enlightenment moral philosophy with Christian teachings:
...most of what is best in [Enlightenment moral philosophy] draws on Christian themes. Nato identifies Kant and Bentham as initiating the two chief traditions in modern moral philosophy. Bentham exhorts us to seek "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," a translation of Christian charity. Kant, who claims that we should treat people as ends not means, is translating the Golden Rule. Neither Kant nor Bentham have good arguments for their respective theses, and were persuasive mainly because Christian Europe was already conditioned to believe things quite similar to these.
To construe “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as a mere translation of Christian charity is to help oneself to an astonishing amount. How is Christian charity any more equivalent to that than Muslim charity, or Buddhist charity, or the charity encouraged by Native American beliefs, or the charity urged by myriad other native traditions, ancient philosophers, and so on? Charity seems to be a widespread value in general human culture. Further, I don’t see how “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” much less the rest of Bentham’s utilitarianism, is equivalent to the idea of charity at all. Utilitarian reasoning in the form of that statement can militate for or against charity in a given analysis of a particular situation, and of course the far subtler modifications of/diversions from the tradition that Bentham started take more words to express than exist in the whole of the Bible.
I hardly know what to say about Kant supposedly translating the golden rule. I suppose one could regard the golden rule as consonant with Kant’s philosophy, but “treat others as you would wish to be treated” is mostly an elegantly-phrased exhortation to be nice with many snappily-put analogues from a plethora of cultures. I can’t figure out any way to meaningfully reduce Kant’s ethical philosophy to an argument for being nice.
Now, it’s true that it helped Enlightenment philosophy that its various ethical systems didn’t demand dramatic departures from European moral intuition, informed as it was by its Christian tradition, but the works of those philosophers and their modern counterparts are not exactly unread and unfollowed in, say, Japan, which has no Christian tradition to speak of.
Finally we arrive at the substantive beginning of Nathanael’s essay:
A lot of modern philosophers "offer theoretical backing to the moral practice that Nathanael grants has been improving" in some sense, but those theories are incomplete and flawed. To be more precise, their arguments have been refuted, by Alasdair MacIntyre and Bertrand Russell, for example. It's not in the interests of professional philosophers to admit this, and moreover, professional philosophers may be a self-selecting group, since, for example, those who see immediately that Kant's arguments fail are unlikely to become Kant scholars. The general public, however, might be said to demonstrate its unpersuaded-ness by having lost interest in moral philosophy, though not in religion.
The first sentence of that quote is an allusion to my statement:
...modern ethical philosophers have some excellent offerings on how to get from raw self-interest all the way to pursuing common goods at (at least superficially) personal disadvantage. Baier, Moore and Hare are examples of this from different schools, but of course there are a great many more. None of them are really complete and flawless by any means...
I am highly skeptical of the ability of finite humans to achieve a complete and flawless moral system, my belief in the ongoing (fitful) improvement of both theoretical and practical morality notwithstanding. Nathanael’s casual assertion that modern moral philosophers’ arguments have been “refuted”, however, may just possibly require more support than his bald asseveration. MacIntyre’s “After Virtue”, presumably the modern source of Nathanael’s belief that ethical philosophy has proven hopeless (and which also focused inordinately on Nietzsche as the father of modern ethics), is certainly a powerful, clever book but not only is MacIntyre’s position highly contentious (and does not address Dennett’s position, to which I subscribe), I think Nathanael has gone a bit beyond even MacIntyre. Certainly I welcome more discussion of the flaws and virtues of particular ethical theories to explore our respective beliefs.
As for Nathanael’s hypothesis regarding the reasons professional philosophers continue to publicly hold Kant and general ethical philosophy in good regard, one could easily turn the same logic against theologians, a tack I have mentioned but dismissed as unfair in previous essays. I doubt Nathanael intends to offer such an ad-hominem type argument seriously anyway.
Finally, I must respond to the public’s supposed “unpersuaded-ness.” If we measure the public’s interest in moral philosophy by its references to Christ versus Kant or Mill, the existence of a large, well-funded, 2000-year-old Christian church (in its various incarnations) gives Christ a distinctive advantage. Philosophy departments do have their own pedagogical heft, but they hardly outweigh seminary schools nor do very many recipients of degrees in philosophy go on establish large weekly social groups devoted to advocating their favored school of thought. A handful do go on to earn doctorates and a proportion of those end up teaching philosophy, but this represents a vanishingly small cadre compared to their theological competition. Given such a large demagogic lead, it would actually seem like the relative pervasiveness of explicit invocation of Enlightenment moral philosophy requires explanation. I can offer a number of hypotheses that don’t require the philosophies in question be any more attractive or persuasive than religious alternatives, but I think that’s sufficient to cast doubt on the ascription of Christianity’s powerful share in the marketplace of ideas to its more persuasive content.
I could also argue that many Enlightenment moral ideas have won so completely that they are now the status-quo, obscuring the link between modern intuitions about moral calculus and these theories that are no longer novel. Advancing that position, however, would require a lot of careful study and analysis that I’m ill-equipped to undertake. Likely the idea has been suggested, defined, criticized and defended already by trained professionals, but as I’ve not encountered such a dialog, I hold only a very weak preliminary opinion on its sustainability.
And so at the end of a little shy of 4000 words I arrive at my conclusion that Nathanael’s perception of what is “obvious” about the weakness of materialism and the prospects of materialist ethics is at least as dubious as my ill-chosen claim that tradition “OBVIOUSLY cuts ZERO ice.” At this point I want to leave attempts at objective analysis aside for a moment and turn to a poem I wrote a while back that expresses my feelings about evangelism of secular, materialist morality. I’m not much of a poet, but perhaps sometimes the spiritual side of one’s deep convictions is best evoked by poetical language.
I have nothing to offer you
No easy answers
No freedom from toil
No way to set your conscience to rest
In three easy steps
If you buy my product I can guarantee you
Only hard work
Only uncertainty
Only a long hard fight to give people what they already own
But don't want
I can't offer you the stars or the moon
Everything I give you will be the sweat of your own brow
I have nothing to offer you
Except freedom
*For a popular but confused attempt by an eminent theoretical physicist to make room for his “uncaused” conception of freewill via quantum calculations, see Roger Penrose’s “The Emperor’s New Mind.” Though quite brilliant, Penrose’s approach to consciousness suffers fatally from a lack of appreciation of heuristic algorithms - not particularly surprising in a physicist but nonetheless crippling in someone addressing cognitive science.
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