brantleypollock

[brantleypollock]

Morality, Pt. 2

The single question that all of ethics is based around is this: what makes something good? And not just beneficial or pleasurable, but objectively good. By what system of measurement can we understand what makes an action morally praiseworthy or morally reprehensible? Who or what is responsible for defining human beings as valuable and as people who should be honored and respected?

 For a time, Immanuel Kant and John Stewart Mill were the two leading thinkers on this topic. Mill defended a utilitarian view of morality, which holds that the effects of an action are what determine the moral status of said action. More plainly stated, the question Mill wants to ask is: does the action maximize human well-being? If the answer is yes, then the action could be considered good. Kant, on the other hand, held that the morality of actions had nothing to do with effects, but rather with humans acting out of duty in obedience to an objective moral law which is derived from eternal reason. Again, to put it more plainly, Kant wants to say that certain things are good, and other things are evil, regardless of how they affect other people. He attempts to ground this in what he refers to as “eternal reason”, which in his mind is, essentially, just necessarily-existent truth.

 It seems to me that both men got it wrong. The reason for this being that they failed to ground objective morality in God. God is the only one who can provide a solid foundation for objective moral standards. If God does not exist, then there seems to be no good basis for suggesting that anything, or anyone, is objectively good or valuable. On atheism, there is nothing that can ground an objective standard of morality. No atheist (or anyone, for that matter) has ever been able to give a convincing argument that has been sufficient to ground objective moral standards in anything other than God. Mill and Kant both certainly tried, but as we will see, it seems they both came up short.

 Let us first evaluate the utilitarian view suggested by John Stewart Mill. It seems as if Mill’s view of morality is bankrupt for two main reasons.

 -       Firstly, Mill’s theory of morality is entirely subjective. No action is inherently right or wrong, but the effects of the action are what determine its moral status. However, it seems clear that in order for anything to be considered truly moral or immoral, and therefore binding to all humans, there must be an objective standard of morality that is mind-independent. That is to say, it is right or wrong regardless of what anybody believes.

 -       Secondly, there is no way, on atheism, to show that maximizing human flourishing is an inherently good thing, and maximizing human flourishing and well-being is the sole premise on which Mill’s morality stands.

 In his peer-reviewed article, The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality, Dr. William Lane Craig describes why morality cannot be subjective in order to be binding. He writes, “To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.”[1] As Dr. Craig rightly points out, subjective morality is entirely based on the perceptions of humanity, and if the Nazi’s had won World War II and forged a world that agreed with their views – namely, that it is most beneficial for human flourishing if only a certain race of people are alive – then Mill’s theory of morality would say that what they did was morally good. Sure, millions of people were slaughtered, but it was all for the good of the human race. If morality is all about the current consensus on what is the best for the human race, then morality can never be truly binding because it is always subject to change. It is always going to be decided by who is in power, or who is winning the culture war. There is no objectivity whatsoever, and if that is the case, then nothing can ever be truly considered “good” or “bad”. Moreover, one should be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims to know what is best for maximal human flourishing. There are certainly things that are beneficial in certain situations, but for any human to claim to know the decisions or the actions that is best for the flourishing of the rest of the human race both now and in the future seems like delusory.

 Suppose, however, that we granted Mill the ability to always be able to demonstrate the action that would do the most amount of good for the greatest amount of people. Why should we think that this is a good thing? The only reason that human flourishing could be objectively good is if humans have some sort of intrinsic moral value. However, Mill was a naturalist, and on the naturalistic view, there simply is no grounding for this intrinsic moral value he attributes to humanity. If naturalism is true, then humans are just accidental beings evolving on a random planet inside the Milky Way galaxy. Why think they have any value whatsoever? There is no meaning behind their existence, and there is no true purpose of their existence. Because of this, on naturalism, there is no non-arbitrary way to show that human flourishing is objectively good, but rather, simply beneficial on a subjective level. Humans are the only ones who care about human flourishing, and there is nothing to set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. To think otherwise would be to fall victim to speciesism, which, according to the Encyclopedia Brittannica, is “the practice of treating members of one species as morally more important than members of other species; also, the belief that this practice is justified.”[2]

 When we survey the animal kingdom, we see lions killing zebras, male sharks forcibly having intercourse with female sharks, and queen bees eating their offspring, but we don’t hold any of them accountable for their actions. Lions do not murder zebras, and sharks do not rape each other. If humanity is simply part of this animal kingdom, why hold them to a higher standard? Especially when their sense of morality is simply a by-product of biological evolution and social conditioning. They were not endowed with a sense of morality, but instead, they evolved in such a way that they began to discover that this “herd mentality” was beneficial for survival. But, again, that cannot truly be considered “good” because humans aren’t really special or valuable. They just happened to evolve faster than the other members of the animal kingdom. Moreover, because humanity’s moral code is a by-product of evolution, it is entirely possible that they could have evolved with a completely different set of moral beliefs and values, and if that is the case, then we can have no confidence that the set of beliefs and values we have evolved with are truly good or bad. They’re just the ones we’ve come to hold based on our situationally-based survival instincts.

 Certain atheist philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and David Hume were all able to grasp this concept, and so adopted a nihilist view of the world – which states that there is no objective truth, no objective value, and no objective purpose. Nothing is truly valuable, and life has no ultimate purpose. If atheism is true, then these philosophers are surely correct in their assessments of the human condition.

 Immanuel Kant seemed to have a good grasp of this concept, and was desperate to affirm objective moral standards. According to the 101-level college philosophy textbook, Philosophy Here and Now, “For Kant, the moral law cannot be something contingent, changeable, or relative. The moral law is absolute, unchangeable and universal, a rock-solid structure build on eternal reason.”[3] Kant understood that in order for morality to be binding, it had to be grounded in objective truth. Actions are not good or evil based on the effects they might bring about. Rather, they are good or evil because they either obey or disobey the objective moral law. The problem with Kant’s theory is that the only foundation he was able to base this objective truth is in eternal reason, which he claims exists necessarily. The problem with this is that Kant has no philosophical grounds for this “eternal reason”. He just states it as a brute fact. If he’s going to attempt to show that this “eternal reason” can exist without God, he’s going to have to somehow base the existence of this knowledge in abstract objects of the Platonic sort. There are a few philosophers attempting to do this (Dr. Erik Wielenberg of North Carolina State University is one of them), but none have been very successful.

 This all leads to the conclusion that God is the only thing that can ground moral value and intrinsic goodness because both of those things are grounded in His very nature. We have just spent time looking at the conclusions of granting the truth of atheism that God does not exist. So, if we grant the alternative, namely, that God exists, then it seems as if we have a firm basis for coming to the conclusion that objective moral values and standards can only be grounded in God. Saint Anselm of Canterbury, the great philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century, defined God as the greatest conceivable being. If we could conceive a being greater than God, then that would be God. Moral perfection is a great-making property of God, and because God – as the greatest conceivable being – has such a property, it follows that objective goodness can be comfortably and firmly grounded in His nature. Because God can only be perfectly good, His standard of goodness will never change, and because of this, things that are good will always be truly and objectively good.

 Finally, it seems that the answer to our initial question, “what makes something good?” is going to be found in the nature of God. God is what makes things good, and anything that is against the moral perfection of God will be considered bad. Certainly, it can be debated whether or not such a person even exists, but that is a topic that will need to be debated elsewhere. The truth of God’s existence is frankly irrelevant to this particular conversation as this is not an argument for God’s existence. This conversation is about what can truly ground objective moral standards and values, and we have seen that only theism is capable of handling such a task. Any attempt at grounding morality in something other than God will be unsustainable, and ultimately indefensible.

[1] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/the-existence-of-god/the-indispensability-of-theological-meta-ethical-foundations-for-morality/

[2] https://www.britannica.com/topic/speciesism

[3] Vaughn, Lewis. “Philosophy Here And Now: Powerful Ideas In Everyday Life.” Oxford University Press. 2016.

[brantleypollock]

On Moral Obligation

For centuries, humanity has wrestled with the idea of morality. Over the years, philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, David Hume, and William Lane Craig (among many others) have all attempted to give arguments for various moral theories. The purpose behind all of this seems to be an attempt at answering this question: “Should humans be moral?” Perhaps a better way of stating this would be as follows: “Does humanity have any sort of moral obligation? Are there things we ought to do and ought not to do?” It’s important to make this distinction initially because we are not talking about what would be beneficial, but rather, what we ought to do. There can certainly be acts that could be beneficial, but that does not mean that those acts are therefore morally binding – or that we are somehow morally obligated to do such an act. It seems to me that the only grounding for this moral obligation is found in a theistic worldview. That is to say, if God does not exist, then humans have no moral obligation. Theism is the only view in which humans have both a duty to be moral and things we ought to do.

In the early 19th century, philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill attempted to show that humans do have a moral obligation, but neither of them grounded such an obligation in God. Kant argued that morality is based upon eternal reason which exists both independently and necessarily, and Mill argued that morality is based upon the consequences of certain actions. For a time, these were the leading philosophical theories of morality. However, a few years later, the atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche essentially dismantled both of these ideas at their core. Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for declaring the “death of God”, which is obviously metaphorical in nature. Nietzsche did not actually believe that God had died because he believed that God never existed in the first place. In any case, by declaring the death of God, Nietzsche was able to convincingly argue for nihilism – which is a view that essentially removes objective meaning, truth, and purpose from life itself. In his work, On The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche dismantles (and invites us to do the same) our preconceived notions of what is considered right, wrong, good, and evil by showing how the very definitions of those words have changed over time. For example, he alludes to Mill’s theory of “usefulness” by showing that “usefulness” itself has had many different iterations over the years. Formerly viewed as mostly “aristocratic”, usefulness is now more following the “herd instinct” mentality. He says, “On the contrary, it is only with a decline of aristocratic value judgments that this whole antithesis between ‘egois- tic’ and ‘unegoistic’ forces itself more and more on man’s conscience, – it is, to use my language, the herd instinct which, with that, finally gets its word in (and makes words).”[1] By the same token, Nietzsche was able to refute Kant’s theory of morality by showing that there is nothing, on a naturalistic basis, that can ground any sort of moral truth because, as history shows us, it is all subjective. Nietzsche’s point with all this is to show that our views of morality stem from our own personal convictions and biases, which means that they cannot be binding in the slightest because nothing can be considered truly “good” or truly “evil”.

If we grant Nietzsche his initial statement, “God is dead”, then we have no basis to argue with his conclusions because it is clear that, without God, there really is no objective, binding truth whatsoever, and therefore – no moral obligation. If our moral compass has been tuned based on our evolution as a species, then it seems to me that we aren’t ever doing anything that could truly be considered “good”, but rather, what is useful to our own species. To continue with the compass analogy, if God does not exist, our moral compass lacks the magnetic pull of “true north”, and it becomes eerily similar to Jack Sparrow’s compass in Pirates of the Caribbean – it just points to what we want most. Bertrand Russell, another atheist philosopher who was prominent in the 20th century, says this, “Ethics arises from the pressure of the community on the individual. Man . . . does not always instinctively feel the desires which are useful to his herd. The herd, being anxious that the individual should act in its interests, has invented various devices for causing the individual’s interest to be in harmony with that of the herd. One of these is [government, one is law and custom, and one is] morality.”[2] What Russell is essentially saying here is that morality has been invented by humanity in order to preserve their species. If this is true, and the preservation of humanity can look different based on perspective (which, historically, it has), how can this morality ever be binding?

As I say, if God does not exist, then humanity has no moral obligation and there is nothing that we ought to do or ought not to do. As we have just seen, philosophers such as Nietzsche and Russell would agree with that. Certainly actions can be beneficial to the “herd mentality” or whatever else is deemed as “useful” in the centuries to come, but nothing can be considered morally binding and somehow become obligatory for humanity. However, when we consider the reality of where this logic leads us, we find ourselves in a very dark, unsettling place. The result of this logic is quite gruesome. If Nietzsche is correct, and life is void of ultimate meaning, purpose, and objective truth, then things such as rape and murder can only be considered an inconvenience to the victims. Without God, there is no objective moral law to say otherwise. Dr. William Lane Craig says this, “Or consider the nature of moral obligation. What makes certain actions right or wrong for us? What or who imposes moral duties upon us? Why is it that we ought to do certain things and ought not to do other things? Where does this 'ought' come from? Traditionally, our moral obligations were thought to be laid upon us by God's moral commands. But if we deny God's existence, then it is difficult to make sense of moral duty or right and wrong.” [3] Moreover, without God, there is nothing that gives human beings true value and meaning, and therefore it follows that ending an innocent human life prematurely is a perfectly acceptable choice to make. It might not be “useful” to the person whose life has just been taken, but it certainly could be “useful” to the one who is taking the life. This is where the logic of philosophers like Nietzsche and Russell takes you.

Alternatively, theism offers a view in which human life is inherently valuable and full of meaning, and it offers sufficient grounds for an objective moral standard. If we do not grant Nietzsche his initial statement, “God is dead”, it becomes very easy to show that humans do, in fact, have a moral obligation. If theism is true, and God exists, then at some point in the past, God made the decision to create the universe and everything in it. As the creator and sustainer of all life, God not only has the right to instill value in his creation, but also possesses the ultimate standard of objective morality, which creates the moral law that humans are obliged to follow. Christian theism, in particular, says that God has created humanity with a purpose, and has instilled in them inherent value which cannot be taken away from them by another human. If this is true, then it follows that we are morally obliged to treat others in a way that lines up with God’s moral commands – we ought not murder, we ought not steal, we ought not rape. Rather, we ought to treat each other like the valuable creations that we are.

In conclusion, when we deny atheism, we find a much clearer path to moral obligation. Certainly, simply denying atheism does not get you all the way to the Christian theism I have just spoken of – that is something that will need to be explored. However, the purpose was not to show Christian theism to be true, but rather to show that theism is the only viable view if one is wanting to provide good grounds for moral obligation. Alternatively, if one accepts Nietzsche’s statement, “God is dead”, there is no escaping the meaninglessness of life and the absence of any sort of absolute truth, and as a result, humanity has no moral obligation whatsoever.

[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, et al. “'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings.” 'On the Genealogy of Morality' and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 12–12.

[2] Russell, Bertrand. Human Society in Ethics and Politics. Routledge, 2016. Chapter 10.

[3] Craig, William Lane. “The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality.” Reasonable Faith, www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/scholarly-writings/the-existence-of-god/the-indispensability-of-theological-meta-ethical-foundations-for-morality/

[brantleypollock]

Be Alert

“For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in heavenly places.” - Ephesians 6:12

I realize that this is not the most uplifting verse I’ve ever posted, but the Lord has been showing me how true and relevant this verse is. Whether it’s religion, politics, race, reputation, or anything else - we, as humans, have allowed ourselves to be convinced that our battle is with each other, and that is exactly what the enemy wants. We have completely let our guard down and allowed him to destroy us from the inside, and we haven’t even realized it. We have no filters on our eyes, ears, mouths, or minds, and as a result, our hearts have become numb to the spiritual warfare that is happening in our lives. 

How often do we let our anger get the best of us? How often do we watch something, whether it’s a movie, a tv show, or something online that we absolutely should not be watching, but we do it anyways because, “It’s not that big of a deal.” How often do we let unwholesome speech leave our mouths? How often do we make lifestyle choices that we know aren’t beneficial, but again, “It’s not that big of a deal.”

Recently, I’ve seen so much evidence of spiritual warfare happening both in my own life and in the lives of those around me, and unless we bring that to light, the enemy will just continue to operate in the shadows - which is where he loves to be.

Paul goes on in this chapter and says “Pray in the Spirit at all times and on every occasion. Stay alert and be persistent in prayer.” This is absolutely vital for those who follow Jesus. We MUST continually pray and stay alert because if we don’t, the enemy will be able to sneak in with ease. We know this because we’ve seen it. However, we aren’t helpless to the attacks of the enemy. The Lord has given us everything we need to fight him off, we just have to be intentional about doing it.

Pray. Stay alert.