Euthyphro Problems and Bad Religion – or – The Imaginary Invalidity

Douthat wants infinitely more from morality than guidance on how to live. Catholic thinking, indeed most Christian thinking, has always agreed with the serpent in the garden that those who understand the difference between good and evil are like a gods. The imitation of Christ is generally thought of as a discipline of humility, but it’s aim is, after all, apotheosis.

One can admire the metaphysical longing embodied in theological ethics or think that it is simply wishful thinking and vanity, but those who are looking for a transcendent absolute are always going to be unimpressed by secular people who are simply trying to figure out what they should do next. Insisting on a theological dimension to moral reasoning is all the more urgent to modern Christians because so many of the other justifications for belief in a supernatural deity have lost their force.

Darling husband, I think you should have just let Ross “I would do anything for love, but I won’t” Douthat drown. You have muddied the waters with this continental nonsense and now it won’t be as instantly obvious that he is going under. Why are you willing to set all of philosophy ablaze so that Douthat will come scuttling out at the end? Honestly.

I’m more surprised “I would do anything for love, but I won’t” Douthat didn’t avail himself of any number of handy Christian solutions to this time-worn problem. He’s a goddamn Catholic! He’s a member of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church etc., and he does not have to “worry his pretty [sic] little [sic] head about it.” On account of the Nicene creed and all. Or he can just pull a maneuver more popular among the rebel kids in their Pentecostal penny-loafers down at the sock hop and say he has had, or continues to have, an internal experience to which you, Skeptic Sanchez, will never be privy until you believe in Jesus as the Lord your Savior, at which point you will have access to secure foundations for your code of ethics, in such wise as it is impossible even to gesture at. I thought Catholics got to say “because God says so, and also He providentially arranged the world so that what He loved would be good, so you lose double, annoying philosopher guy, neener neener!” Someone wasn’t paying attention in 3rd grade Sunday school, I can tell you that, and Sister McIlhenny is very disappointed.

Progressives are in desperate need of some secular buddhism to dig themselves out of this hole of materialism. Abrahamic religions are an amazingly special snowflake of incoherence, but trying to point that out from a worldview that you’ve basically cribbed off them, minus Teh God, leads to nonsense like this. Which was actually sort of Douthat’s point in the first place

I haven’t read Euthyphro I’m afraid.

From the couple of theology subjects I’ve studied Catholic Christianity in principle is not so much about a personal relationship with God, and inherently recognizes the difficulties of remaining, say, pious, or living according to one’s culture/metaphysics under Empire, in this case Roman. Specifically, one might presumably posit it is about attempting to follow Christ’s commandment to love one another and attempting to keep faith and hope.

I have never read about a non- Enlightenment influenced secular culture – has anyone else?

I only speak English, but I presume on this basis that language always has a metaphysical component. I cannot for the life of me figure out how one can on the one hand insist only on a physical existence and then on the other use metaphysical words. Can someone help me out?

Regarding poetry, I guess it must depend on the poem and poet. Monotheism rules this degree of relativism out – there may be different schools or saints and so one, but only a single God. This doesn’t hold for The Poet, unless one goes Platonic and sees The Poet as a form…

Sorry, and so on, not one.

I have never read about a non- Enlightenment influenced secular culture – has anyone else” Confucian China?

Syncretic Japan? Not that I believe very strongly in the possibility of a “secular” or nihilistic culture.

I have never read about a non- Enlightenment influenced secular culture – has anyone else?

Some aspects of Hellenistic society might qualify.

There are also historical traditions of atheism in India.

I guess you could translate ‘chap’ as ‘Jüngling’.

Mmm… Jüngling means “youth/young man” (as does kouros, if I’m not mistaken); I’m not sure why you think those are good translations for “chap” (to me, at least, “chap” doesn’t necessarily imply youth).

Wiktionary suggests Kerl or Typ, which strike me as more appropriate.

I think John is right to see a Rorty/Heidegger/Nietzsche vein in Douthat. I made, in the different context of Douthat’s views on sex, a similar claim, only I emphasized the Nietzsche/Foucault dimensions of Douthat’s writing. But in both cases, the underlying point is the same. Or almost the same. http://coreyrobin.com/2011/09/13/the-mile-high-club-what-the-right-really-thinks-about-sex/

@22. Yes, I can see a Nietzschian element in Douthat’s argument.

I’d agree with the suggestion that the post-Christian west still follows an ethics that is basically Christian in origin, but the original justification for it has gone.

Scientific method is very good on how to do something, once you’ve decided you want to it, but pretty much silent on whether you should do it or not. Which leaves a “rational” politics in the strange position of needing to rely on a lot of irrational stuff for the “should” aspect.

But I don’t buy at all the argument that one ought to have a logically consistent system of ethics, that Christianity provides such a system, and therefore we ought to be Christian. I’d have more sympathy with a Christian apologist who argued that since you’re going to have to make completely irrational leaps of faith anyway, even if you’re an atheist, you might as well go the whole hog. But then I’m (a) a fan of Philip K Dick and (b) tend towards the “lunatic” conclusion of C. S. Lewis “Lord, liar or lunatic” argument.

Dear Ross,
I don’t exist. No, really, I don’t. I’m not even writing this, some commenter on a blog is. Which makes your entire codified moral belief system of “expert validation” — or what you call “revelation” — just one more product of the minds of human beings, so there ain’t anything remotely divine about it no matter how much you say or believe there is. And how whacked is that humans such as yourself can accept a set of moral principles only if some other human beings made up a bunch of stuff about Yours Truly validating or even authoring it? I don’t exist. That “thumb on the scale of human moral debates” you describe isn’t mine, it’s yours. Seriously. I don’t even have thumbs. So much for My Supreme Goodness validating your particular moral beliefs.
Sorry.
God
P.S. I hope you won’t want to rape or murder anyone now.

Virtue is not something that’s commanded by liberalism, the way a magistrate (or a whimsical alien overlord) might issue a legal code, but something that’s inherent to the liberal conception of the liberal nature. Liberalism does not establish morality; it embodies it. It does not set standards; it is the standard. And even when it issues principles or precepts through revelation (as in the Bill of Rights or the Gettysburg Address) it isn’t legislating in the style of Hammurabi or Solon. Instead, it’s revealing something about its own nature and inviting us to conform ourselves to the standards that it sets.

Revelation does, in this sense, provide a kind of “expert validation” in the sense that Sanchez suggests, effectively putting a liberal thumb on the scale of human moral debates. (Accepting that representative democracy is the incarnation of the Liberal State clearly has implications for moral theorizing, which is why the Enlightenment’s triumph in the Western world worked a moral revolution as well as a theological one.) But in general, the point of invoking liberalism in moral debates is not to pre-emptively solve the dilemmas that moral philosophers grapple with. Certainly no serious liberal moralist has ever suggested that moral problems are “a black box” that “we don’t need to worry our pretty little heads about” because liberalism will always tell us what to do. Rather, the possibility of a liberal state’s existence — and with it, the possibility that moral laws no less than physical laws correspond to an actual reality, or Reality — is what makes those problems genuinely meaningful and interesting (as opposed to just innings in an “ethics game”) and lends the project of moral reasoning its coherence. The idea of liberalism doesn’t replace secular moral reasoning, in other words, but it grounds this reasoning in something more durable than just aesthetic preference.

God does not establish morality; he embodies it. He does not set standards; he is the standard.

Do statements like this explain anything? It is definitely Aquinian in its nebulousness, just like the statement, ‘God is not a being, God is Being.’ This doesn’t even rise to the level of a Daniel Dennett “deepity,” which has at least one trivial level of truth to it.

And by the way…although the thread is young, I’m convinced that Belle has already won it.

@10:

…trying to point that out from a worldview that you’ve basically cribbed off them…

Umm, speak for yourself.

Progressives are in desperate need of some secular buddhism to dig themselves out of this hole of materialism.

Genuinely secular Buddhism- in which I too find a lot of ethical value- is perfectly compatible with a thoroughgoing scientific materialism. (Even the Buddha himself might not have disagreed, if the Poison Arrow Parable is anything to go by.)

Although note that the vast majority of the world’s Buddhists practice a theistic, supernatural Buddhism. Outside of western Buddhism, only the most minimalist Theravadin sects could be called atheistic.

85% of the Japanese say they are non-religious and 60% have a Buddhist altar (even if only a magic stone) in their homes, says Wikipedia. Makes sense to me.

I once asked a Japanese friend – after I found out she considered herself a Christian and regularly went to Church which surprised me a bit because I just had never thought of her as that kind of girl – if she really believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, died for our sins and was resurrected on the third day. She looked at me as if I had gone completely crazy and said “no of course not.” To her being a Christian resembled the way other Japanese might be Shintoists; they take some thoughts and ideas from the religious texts, may perform rituals, but whether it is all true doesn’t really enter into it. I had a hard time explaining to her that actually believing in it, or professing to believe in it, is a fundamental part of the Western way of doing religion.

I’ve read Corey Robin’s post that he linked above. I don’t really see the Foucauld-Douthat connection that Corey outlines in his “ardor of adversity” paragraph. According to that passage as I read it, Foucauld’s ‘adversity’ is the difficulty of constantly finding or inventing novel sexual experiences for oneself. Douthat’s (and the conservative’s in general) ‘adversity’ is the difficulty of constant self-denial or self-repression as he/she climbs the moral mountain of “excellence,” i.e. adherence to traditional norms of sexuality or of celibacy, I suppose. Yes, the metaphor of “adversity” might travel, but these kinds of ‘adversity’ are so different I don’t see much connection between them.

Ross Douthat couldn’t persuade me that the sun rises in the east. But refuting him does lead to interesting arguments, like this one. That puts him a step above an intellectual clubfoot like Jonah Goldberg, whose attempts to be a Deep Thinker bring to mind a little girl playing dressup with mommy’s wardrobe.

Outside of western Buddhism, only the most minimalist Theravadin sects could be called atheistic.

Of course. But we are all free to take from any set of ideas what we can use, and in this case there is no fundamental logical contradiction to stop us.

You don’t need to deny that this statement has denotative meaning

But I do, nevertheless. You might as well say that the substance of Jello is the substance of sweetness and wriggliness. It’s merely a series of noises you make with your mouth.

*sentence

Steve et alia: the problem remains of religious faith as a guide to morality no matter how minimal the element of revelation. One can go full mystic and say “I know this to be true because I experience it as true in a particular way” but that makes convincing someone else hard. There are multiple experiences of religious belief, and no reason to suspect mystics of any tradition of lying. So then one has to judge between multiple competing revelations.

At this point we are back at square 1: there are multiple moral systems, each claiming to be the right one. How do we decide? The Catholic answer would be you don’t: through faith you know one to be the right one. Again, we’ve already ruled that out. So then the only other alternative is reason, in which case you might as well use that to decide what is right.

I think I see what you’re saying, John, but let’s put this in the context of Rorty’s much larger disagreement with Douthat. As you quote him, the latter says:

Rather, the possibility of God’s existence — and with it, the possibility that moral laws no less than physical laws correspond to an actual reality, or Reality — is what makes those problems genuinely meaningful and interesting (as opposed to just innings in an “ethics game”) and lends the project of moral reasoning its coherence. The idea of God doesn’t replace secular moral reasoning, in other words, but it grounds this reasoning in something more durable than just aesthetic preference.

Moral problems are “genuinely meaningful and interesting” or even “coherent” only if “moral laws … correspond to an actual reality, or Reality.” Otherwise, they’re just an “ethics game” based on “aesthetic preference.” Now it’s true that Rorty [the “bad Rorty”?] sometimes talks as if he accepts this dichotomy and tries to fluff up the latter disjunct into something more substantial than it looks. (And sometimes he makes some interesting points in this vein, but overall I don’t think it’s worth it.)

But most of the time, or at least in the part of his work that I like, he attacks the dichotomy itself, often in the aspect of the “correspondence theory of truth” Douthat appeals to here (without argument, naturally, as if it made perfect sense). For [the “good”?] Rorty, it’s not that – in rejecting “authoritarianism” – we reject the “correspondence to Reality” of the truth we thereby abandon and try to make do with what’s left. It’s instead that we reject the idea that such “correspondence” – itself the incoherent idea by Rorty’s Davidsonian/Wittgensteinian lights – has anything to do with truth. This opens up the possibility of saying no, it’s not just aesthetic preference, our moral judgments are just as true as anything else is (and the question “and how true is that?” is just as incoherent as the notion of “correspondence”).

So Rorty’s secularist isn’t a physicalist hoping to cobble together transcendent truth from “mere” empirical observation (and surreptitiously borrowing same from Christianity and hoping no one will notice the incoherence of so doing). He sees normativity as irreducible but not thereby “transcendently real” in the platonistic manner. Unfortunately Rorty goes back and forth between his two strategies, which makes him frustrating to read.

Actually Douthat sounds more like Fish than Rorty here. He thinks he knows the real truth, and even thinks he has a rigorous argument to that effect, but secularists are so fallen away (through sin/rebellion/etc.) from the truth that they can’t recognize this (and so resort to theft). That’s not relativism – he thinks secularism is false, not just another worldview. That’s what Fish says too. This is what justifies his (Fish’s) sophistry: if argument worked on the likes of you, we’d use that, but since it can’t, we are justified, given the truth of what we believe, in manipulating you by rhetorical means. Douthat never says that, to my knowledge, but that’s the family resemblance that jumps out at me, rather than the one to Rorty and Poetry or whatever.

Oh, and it’s “Molière”, not “Moliére”. Sister Hélène is very disappointed.

Chris: not without being heretical! Catholic doctrine holds that the good can be known by all, even non-Catholics. Even if you adopt that extreme position, one does have to ask what exactly is wanted given the wide range of opinions on that subject, and once again we are back in the land of reason.

Now, I know that the point here is to flatter yourself by coming up with an even stronger way to say that religion is hokum

No, apparently your point is to show how clever and superior you are by defending utter gibberish. Well, whatever floats your boat.

Steve et alia: the problem remains of religious faith as a guide to morality no matter how minimal the element of revelation.

The Buddha, or at any rate whosever words got put in his mouth by the time these things were written down, actively discouraged people from taking anything (including his own teachings) on faith and adjured them to be guided by their own experience.

But, of course, you don’t think that the statement about Jello (or about God) is of equal semantic coherence as Chomsky’s example. After all, you chose actual qualities of Jello (wriggliness and sweetness) in order to build your example. That fact alone refutes what you’re saying.

I don’t know why you feel you have to gild the lily. Saying “Douthat’s claim is philosophically meaningless” is actually more damning than saying “Douthat’s claim literally lacks semantic coherence.”

But, of course, you don’t think that the statement about Jello (or about God) is of equal semantic coherence as Chomsky’s example.

Wrong again.

After all, you knew what it meant enough to be offended by it.

And wrong yet again. (Offended? My, aren’t you the self-important one.) Bye.

@40

“According to that passage as I read it, Foucauld’s ‘adversity’ is the difficulty of constantly finding or inventing novel sexual experiences for oneself. ”

But that’s not all Foucault’s adversity is.

I misspelled Foucault @40. Sorry about that.

@64 — care to elaborate?

After #66 — I meant to write, the answer is not algorithmic. What I am trying to get at, is that meaningful changes of context are not programmable from the level you are at, unless you have already done it. It is either a creative invention (which can be dangerous) or it is demonstrated from outside, by another person.

@10 “but trying to point that out from a worldview that you’ve basically cribbed off them, minus Teh God, leads to nonsense like this. Which was actually sort of Douthat’s point in the first place”

Morality, what it means to be a decent human being, predates Christianity by many thousands of years.

Genuinely secular Buddhism- in which I too find a lot of ethical value- is perfectly compatible with a thoroughgoing scientific materialism

To me, the core of buddhist thought is a rejection of materialism as the path to truth. It’s an almost total inversion of the dualistic western way of understanding the world. The separation of the world into things and in fact the belief in ourselves as entities which persist through something called time is our own self-perpetuated illusion. That doesn’t mean science has nothing of value to say, but it is put into a sandbox. (@27) I think saying we westerners have “weird ideas and get tied up in knots over nonproblems” is a pretty concise summary of the situation

That we’re even having this discussion proves people still take the whole “magic man in the sky” fairy tale way too seriously. Why not just stop talking to people who believe in childish fairy tales, and instead start thinking through and explicating your own system of beliefs about the world that aren’t merely a reaction to, or subtraction of, the fairy tale

Agree that Belle already won the thread.

There is no obvious reason why Douthat is worrying his head about this, much less why he’s bothering other people (most of whom are presumably not believers in his particular brand). If this is really the very most important question, then Fish (see @52) is absolutely right.

But the standard uses of Douthat’s It insists that it is a purely secular and scientific enterprise even as it grounds its politics in metaphysical claims. are things like this: How can you believe the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, unless you believe the truth of generalities is guaranteed by God as understood traditionally as laid out by Aquinas? How can you believe murder is wrong, unless you believe in the scriptural truth of the Old Testament? How can you live a good life, unless you incorporate yourself into a religious community the morals of which come via apostolic succession via ancient Rome?

The argument is used to exclude those who won’t accept the dichotomy, while allowing the non-“secular humanist” to lay claim to all the virtues that ever were (without having to actually demonstrate them–).

Bianca, “murder is wrong” — In defense of Douthat, who I have often criticized here, this is also about where in life this is given to learn. If a kid becomes a Nazi skinhead, how is this to be accounted for? Inner pain; psychopathy; bad mother; teenage angst; a prior racial incident in the neighborhood; not hearing a proclamation of the Enlightenment’s principles? Or, any of them, because the world is complex? So from whom in authority would he necessarily hear that “murder is wrong”, as he was growing up? Douthat it seems to me is partly asking a question of the nature of how this is to be inculcated, — where it is, exactly, that the mumbo-jumbo is to be incanted, — and if so, then he is speaking in an older and cynically smarter Catholic tradition that is intendedly, confessedly sociological and control-orientated in part. That actually doesn’t bother me so much, now that science is here!, though I guess it will give others the heebie-jeebies. Where it goes wrong for me is where they unite the metaphysics of the psychotherapy with the INEXORABILITY of the judgement and penalty.

The left needs a religion policy.

The left does have a religion policy, though: vanguardism. Liberals are the ones missing it.

@Corey, #22. I think the association of “overcoming” with conservative ways of being is too simple by a long shot. And that has consequences for the connection with Nietzsche, who advocated the revaluation of all values, not just those about sex.

For example, conservatism is (They’d say “historically.” I wouldn’t.) not about overcoming “instinctive” revulsion when a biracial couple moves in next door. Or disgust at what teh gays are up to. Or a desire to make more money. Or a desire to throw a small country up against the wall to let the Muslims know the US doesn’t kid around. It’s about overcoming desires that have already been ruled out by other ideological strictures.

On the other hand, the left claims to be all about overcoming false consciousness. At least that’s what its members, especially the folks in the antiracism/antisexism and even environmental sections will say about themselves. And they’ll further say that the work is incredibly difficult, but ennobling. They approach the task with something that can only be described as zeal.

For some reason, the foot fetish example reminds me of a modernized O. Henry story.

It’s not a difference of approach or character, I don’t think. It’s a different in the analysis of what we should be overcoming first. And I think if we start overcoming where Nietzsche and Foucault tried to start, by the time we get to most political movements in the west, the particular historical obstacles will be always already overcome.

Conservatism, in its late capitalist form, seems to me to be about being able to indulge one’s urge to be seen as a manly, independent actor, individual and untrammeled by anything, even one’s deepest desires. That way you can combine economic license with repression of other things, to the benefit of the shareholders. (I invite others to come up with an equally invidious characterization of the left. It can be done. But since I’m in that camp, I’d probably pull my punches.)

Belle’s winning is undeniably an absolute truth.

well, what do you expect when a feeble-mind like Douthat argues with a smart, fairly independent-minded libertarian like Sanchez? a demolition!

OK, can’t resist posting this Ashbery poem in this thread.

Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough
for another thought in my head, I had this great idea–
call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,
it involved living the way philosophers live,
according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a
kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.
Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom
or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought
for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,
would be affected, or more precisely, inflected
by my new attitude. I wouldn’t be preachy,
or worry about children and old people, except
in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.
Instead I’d sort of let things be what they are
while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate
I thought I’d stumbled into, as a stranger
accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,
revealing a winding staircase with greenish light
somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside
and the bookcase slides shut, as is customary on such occasions.
At once a fragrance overwhelms him–not saffron, not lavender,
but something in between. He thinks of cushions, like the one
his uncle’s Boston bull terrier used to lie on watching him
quizzically, pointed ear-tips folded over. And then the great rush
is on. Not a single idea emerges from it. It’s enough
to disgust you with thought. But then you remember something
William James
wrote in some book of his you never read–it was fine, it had the
fineness,
the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, yet
still looking
for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it
even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and
his alone.

It’s fine, in summer, to visit the seashore.
There are lots of little trips to be made.
A grove of fledgling aspens welcomes the traveler. Nearby
are the public toilets where weary pilgrims have carved
their names and addresses, and perhaps messages as well,
messages to the world, as they sat
and thought about what they’d do after using the toilet
and washing their hands at the sink, prior to stepping out
into the open again. Had they been coaxed in by principles,
and were their words philosophy, of however crude a sort?
I confess I can move no farther along this train of thought–
something’s blocking it. Something I’m
not big enough to see over. Or maybe I’m frankly scared.
What was the matter with how I acted before?
But maybe I can come up with a compromise–I’ll let
things be what they are, sort of. In the autumn I’ll put up jellies
and preserves, against the winter cold and futility,
and that will be a human thing, and intelligent as well.
I won’t be embarrassed by my friends’ dumb remarks,
or even my own, though admittedly that’s the hardest part,
as when you are in a crowded theater and something you say
riles the spectator in front of you, who doesn’t even like the idea
of two people near him talking together. Well he’s
got to be flushed out so the hunters can have a crack at him–
this thing works both ways, you know. You can’t always
be worrying about others and keeping track of yourself
at the same time. That would be abusive, and about as much fun
as attending the wedding of two people you don’t know.
Still, there’s a lot of fun to be had in the gaps between ideas.
That’s what they’re made for! Now I want you to go out there
and enjoy yourself, and yes, enjoy your philosophy of life, too.
They don’t come along every day. Look out! There’s a big one…

Anyone who could read the Torah and think God was moral needs their head examined

And much the same applies to anybody who can read the news and still think the Catholic Church is a force for moral behavior.

Lee,
What point are you trying to make? Obviously Douthat is not coming from a “sociological” version of Catholicism. He’ s saying something like: if you’re not a Christian you’re immoral (viz. ghetto kids can be helped by local churches); then, later, if you’re a different kind of Christian than a Catholic you’re immoral (too bad for the ghetto kids where the churches are often evangelical); then, later, if you’re actually moral and not actually a Catholic you’re some kind of free-rider or at least intellectually incoherent and with no right to make the claims you do. A “sociological Catholicism” surely would be slightly happier with whatever gets morals into the kids’ heads.

Agree with those above who have noted that Belle @8 won the thread, which essentially ended with Sister McIlhenny and her disappointment.

Well, Catholics don’t really have it as simple as all that. But the rest of what she said is spot on.

Wait – we’re supposed to anchor our morality in capital-R Reality by interpreting the interpretations of tenth-hand transcriptions of dreams that a bunch of Iron Age shepherds had about their imaginary friend in the sky? WAT.

Douthat must have a massive stash of weapons-grade crack to get this stoopid.

@#91 Data Tutashkhia, 10:24 PM
Douthat is explicitly referring to God as a Revelation, something with a name and a narrative. If you want to take an abstract core piece of morality, name that piece “God”, and say it is essential to morality (that it’s a core piece of morality, if you will) and that you think it could only could come as a Revelation, you can do that, but (1) it’s circular reasoning, with a bit of sleight-of-hand thrown in; and (2) it has little to do with anything anyone else is talking about.

Beyond that, if it’s not clear to you why murder would be wrong from first principles and without a Revelation dictating this is so, you might consider reading some of the work of people who’ve wrestled with this question before you rather than deciding that a Revelation must be necessary.

“Absent that, it’s not clear to me why murder has to be wrong; is it because it “makes sense” for it to be wrong? Well, not to me, if I’m very hungry and you refuse to share.”

That you Bibi?

85% of the Japanese say they are non-religious and 60% have a Buddhist altar

Following up on this, I once read a book about religion by a Japanese author, who commented that a UNESCO multi-country survey of religious beliefs had asked the wrong question in Japan. The question asked was, Are You Religious?, but in Japan, he insisted, it should have been worded “What religion is your household?”

Phrased like that, people would have readily answered, “We’re Shinran sect”, “We’re Soto Zen”, and even, I suppose, “We’re Japanese Mountain Religion“. And even the loneliest little Shinto shrine on a remote mountain pathway is regularly, lovingly tended by someone.

I do love the idea that someone who has yet to master one of Plato’s more famous arguments gets to lecture us all about which views of morality are coherent and which aren’t.

The bit that made me mad, though, was this: “the possibility of God’s existence — and with it, the possibility that moral laws no less than physical laws correspond to an actual reality, or Reality — is what makes those problems genuinely meaningful and interesting (as opposed to just innings in an “ethics game”) and lends the project of moral reasoning its coherence.”

Really? Without God’s existence, figuring out what the right thing to do is, in a genuinely hard situation, is just innings in an ethics game, not genuinely meaningful and interesting? I honestly have a hard time wrapping my mind around someone saying that.

How could he *not* find a serious moral problem, like whether Gandhi or the early Mandela was right about the legitimacy of political violence (as asked by, say, a potential recruit to the ANC in the 70s), interesting all by itself? And how on earth would this alleged lack of interestingness and meaning be changed by God’s existence?

If you think about it, it’s fairly stunning. (To me, at least.)

Hilzoy, I’m guessing that Douthat’s answer to the question would break down into about this:

Your duty is to determine the authorities anointed by God, and then submit to them. Start with the Pope. Follow all their orders. Come back if, and only if, anything remains unclear.

Joining the ANC would therefore not be okay because the South African authorities were in better standing with the Pope than any of their challengers. Therefore, no interesting question remains.

Bianca, You may be right but I think that someone who is arguing, not simply that Christianity is true, but that because it is true it is a better basis for morality, is sort of letting the cat out of the bag. Because if it is true, then what it means for comparative moral origins is really beside the point. It reminds me of a very long conversation I had with a Catholic priest who was willing to allow that the Christian story is true, is to be believed, as metaphor or allegory.

hilzoy: “Really? Without God’s existence, figuring out what the right thing to do is, in a genuinely hard situation, is just innings in an ethics game, not genuinely meaningful and interesting? I honestly have a hard time wrapping my mind around someone saying that.”

Yeah, I agree.

And I think Sanchez was doing Douthat too much credit by assuming he knew his Euhtyphro. If he actually knew it, we would’ve been spared this excruciating display.

Steve @84
So if Jello is not sweet is there any meaning in Ashbery?

Postlude and Prequel, John Ashbery (LRB 2011)

Would I lie to you? I don’t know what to say to you,
and the season is coming into season just now
with long- awaited words from back when we were
friends and still are, of course, but the tides
pursue their course each day. Perturbing elements
listen in the wings, which are coming apart at the seams.
Is it all doggerel and folderol? A cracked knowledge?
Monkey journalism?

This is better thank the other overlooked good
that dried up a while back and whispers.
The results, if any, won’t last too much longer
and I meanwhile am on my way to correct you
about the tickets and their availability.
We pitch and stiffen, elbowed by traffic mysteriously
descending the other lane of the avenue
as lamps burst in many-benched Central Park.

Warren Terra, notice that I didn’t mention any particular religion, just a symbolic figure representing the concept of humanity. Or, in your example, a tribe.

You mentioned ‘first principles’ twice now, but the only one I know is ‘I think therefore I am’; how do you get from that to ‘murder is wrong’?

Anyway, I don’t think the problem is just efficiency. Of course we are free to incorporate (arbitrarily, as a matter of taste) concern for humanity into our model, but that still doesn’t produce, logically, the taboo on murder. Why shouldn’t I axe an old lady loan shark and donate the loot to cancer research?

Warren, that was a reference to Crime and Punishment, which addresses exactly this issue.

So, then, morality is based on Law? And laws are based on what experts believe would be good for society? Well, that works, I guess, especially with Law being a 3-letter word and all, but, eh, I’d probably still require some sort of revelation to accept it.

The Euthyphro dilemma works as a dilemma in ontological terms only because the Olympian gods were like humans writ large, unlike Jehovah which is supposedly a perfect, all-singing-all-dancing being: self-sustaining, necessary and all the rest of it. It is certainly possible to resolve this ontological dilemma by stipulating as a brute fact that there is some such god and its word is neither arbitrary nor dependent on an independent standard of goodness (or what have you), but rather simply identical to The Good [o.w.h.y.]. (You can even spend a few centuries working out further details to try to flesh out such a stipulative position and come up with some convincing reason to think that being a first cause, etc., is related to being the moral authority for humanity (where ‘authority’ is intentionally equivocal as between ‘expert’ and ‘author’).

The trouble is that the key point is not ontological – coming up with a consistent and non-circular account of what = morality (and if it is, then various secular accounts can no doubt pass this test, see below); it’s epistemic. How can we tell what to do/what is good; why should I accept what you say is good, or you what I say? And unsurprisingly, in that case appeal to the revelation of the big J (or similar) does not after all provide a free lunch.

The lunch in question costs one proof that the particular word in question is indeed the word of such a being (where ‘such a being’ must be one whose word is identical to the Good). Which involves proving that there is just such a being, and, e.g., that some set of dogmas derived from some (not obviously consistent) set of documents is in fact an expression of that being’s commands. And that’s at least as difficult as coming up with some parables, sermons on mounts, rules, precepts, doctrines, exhortations etc which people will agree with, see the point of, want to adopt, grasp, etc., or indeed of taking a noble savage route to figuring out the moral law from first principles. Especially since the inetrpetation of whichever bits of writing made it into the authorised version of a holy book is, in actual cases, going to appeal to general considerations of what is in fact good, etc. in any case. For example (and this is one example of the reason why, as any fule no, the Catholic church holds that revealed morality can also be deduced by natural reason), Elizabeth Anscombe, with admirable frankness, takes a thoroughly constructivist turn in her War and Murder:

Christianity forbids a number of things as being bad in themselves. But if I am
answerable for the foreseen consequences of an action or refusal, as much as for the action itself, then these prohibitions will break down. If someone innocent will die unless I do a wicked thing, then on this view I am his murderer in refusing: so all that is left to me is to weigh up evils. Here the theologian steps in with the principle of
double effect and says: “No, you are no murderer, if the man’s death was neither your aim nor your chosen means, and if you had to act in the way that led to it or else do something absolutely forbidden.” Without understanding of this principle, anything can be–and is wont to be– justified, and the Christian teaching that in no circumstances may one commit murder, adultery, apostasy (to give a few examples) goes by the board. These absolute prohibitions of Christianity by no means exhaust its ethic; there is a large area where what is just is determined partly by a prudent
weighing up of consequences. But the prohibitions are bedrock, and without them the Christian ethic goes to pieces. Hence the necessity of the notion of double effect.

The doctrine of double effect is in the end untenable, as I show in my ‘Double Trouble for Double Effect’ (er, forthcoming), but the point is that the supposedly revealed ethics require this kind of fiddling about, and whether this is framed as applying to the principle of charity to the deity’s word in reconstructing its reasoning, or in doing that reasoning for oneself, or designing a positive morality from a position of deliberative reflection doesn’t seem to make any significant difference.

If we want to adopt a Christian-style morality (though note there is plenty of two-stepping involved in supposing that secular liberalism is Christian-style, cf social democracy is/isn’t basically capitalism) and want to accommodate those who claim there is an ontological gap which has to be filled by God (i.e. there is a gap and positing a certain rather specific kind of deity is preferable to just leaving the gap there), we can just put humanity in the gap, as IIRC Wiggins does, following a broadly Humean (and Piercean) naturalist approach. Roughly and briefly, a species- or beings-like-us relativism generates an ideal-observer type of objectivism (intersubjectivism). If humanity finally determines something to be the good, it will have found the actual good (-for-humanity), and the good (-for-humanity) is whatever humanity finally determines to be the good.

Replacing externally real but human-like gods with a merely ideal (godlike) observer created in our own image collapses the ontological dilemma just as CB’s monotheist does – but as well as being consistent and non-circular, the account also has the virtue of being parsimonious, not obviously made up on a foundation of old folk tales, and best of all, making sense – because there is no longer a bald stipulation (or a failed attempt to deduce) that there is a God of just the right kind so that its command and the good necessarily correspond (are identical) without either being prior to, causing, grounding the other. There is no longer any question of a command that might be thought arbitrary, only of humanity working out what to do.

The epistemic problem of actually working out what to do still remains, but is revealed as ontologically no more ‘subjective’ or ‘ungrounded’ than any other project.

Or something.

“Law is an embodiment of society’s goals, including its ideas on morality, not a source of them. And I’m arguing that society’s ideas on morality are an emergent principle because morality that works gets rewarded with the society succeeding, and thus propagating and further adapting that morality, with no Revelation required.”

So there is no independent good or bad, no right or wrong but there is, according to you if not TINA Thatcher ‘society’ which collectively deliberates at any one time (the Borg-like) to determine it’s own (neither right nor wrong) goals and mores. So slavery is not wrong per se, nor war without cause, nor rape etc. Leaving only relativism and arbitrary claims against the mighty.

“I shot Ferdinand de Saussure on a night like this…”

Slavery is an interesting case, since God used to be OK with it in the Bible, yet now it’s a moral anathema.

So is it wrong per se or not, and if it is, why didn’t Jesus say so?

Lee,
You’re right but OTOH why the insistence that for secular believers the moral truths built up by the Western, Christian, etc., traditions are useless because they lack the basis provided by the church? Douthat talks about “consistency” and this is what got Sanchez and Holbo interested (and I’m sure that if pressed I could think of others who really do seem to care about it), but I get the sense that his problem is more with the lack of connection with the church. As if people were taking the church’s truths and not “paying” for them, in the coin of respect, deference and dependence, if not of direct membership and service. Maybe I’m reading somebody else’s concerns into Douthat’s writing. Or maybe I’m stuck on the question why anyone would think metaphysics has to be based in religion much less in Christianity (much less other philosophical questions about the usefulness of “metaphysics,” much less why Plato is supposed to be Christian all of a sudden (didn’t he crib from Moses?)).

Douthat believes that the heart of Christianity is Christ’s suffering for humanity’s sins.

It is immoral to punish one person for the sins of someone else.

If the Christian god is the one who thought up this idea and made it happen, then he is immoral.

It strikes me that those who go around praising this immoral god for punishing the innocent instead of the guilty are also immoral.

@121 Thatnks, for the laugh, football

@ 122 “I mean all the books published in Greek, Latin, English, German, and French, over the past 2,500 years, which were studied and expanded on in Christian monasteries and Christian universities (arguably, well into the twentieth century).”

What about the ones that were studied and expanded upon by Islamic scholars?

Again, I think it all gets filed with the cases of People Who Need to Wake Up, But Don’t Know How. It is a lot of unknowing intellectual argument about something that is not an intellectual process. One reason I don’t read a lot of secular philosophy on the subject. And the religious pundits who jabber on about it can be tallied in their ignorance almost exactly by the number of words they bloviate. A self-purification is always involved, and a self-sacrifice. Words can only describe the process metaphorically, and I would guess that this incompleteness of our description will continue, even after we understand what the brain waves are doing. Jesus Christ as a “narratological actant” (how’s that for high-flown blabber) performs the functions of (1) example of lifestyle of purification (which almost none of his followers follows, it would seem) and (2) the savior to reach-to in your self-annihilation. (You get a self back, so don’t worry your little head about why anyone would want an extinction or “nirvana” or in the Islamic tradition, “fana”.) Jesus also got nailed to a cross, in its bloody horror a remarkable historical advantage in the Rhetoric of Sacrifice department.

Which revealed truth is the real one?

Not everyone has read these great books, or understands these important things about science, so why don’t you guys kindly summarize them for me (and some others, I’m sure). A couple of paragraphs would suffice. Please.

You can’t have science of any kind without some sort of metaphysical commitment- need not be realist, could be, for example, purely pragmatist- underwriting the stability and intersubjective knowability of the phenomena under investigation. And some kind of set of ethical norms- some would call it a commitment to the truth, but there are other ways to express it- is necessary to discourage the kinds of cheating that would make the results unreliable and thus of no use to anybody. Yes, even in “late capitalist applied science” (don’t confuse ethical norms within a practice with those governing how its fruits are used.) These things frankly should be pretty obvious.

Doctor Slack, can’t empirical observation only provide data or detail – the idiography of an argument – but not the nomothetic component?

Should I push that fat guy off the bridge to save five? What do The Books say?

Steve @131: I’m not sure about calling such a commitment “metaphysical.” What does it mean to “underwrite” the stability and knowability of phenomena or propositions?

134: Not as I understand it. The natural sciences are arguably based on the principle that nomothetic propositions can be derived from empirical observation (some viewpoints go further, into proposing that the only valid nomothetic propositions are those derived from empirical observation; hence positivism).

Data,
I’m fond of that dilemma. I think it reveals something about the nature of morality as it lives in the human mind. Obviously, if at every moment you’re calculating how best to help the most people you should push the innocent guy off the bridge to save five other innocents. And yet, at least when hearing about the problem, I tend to think I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to actively kill another person, even if by doing so I passively condemn five more to death.

This is where it’s worth remembering the difference between morality and a social force and mechanism, something that has developed over time because it turns out to aid the reproductive success of a society and its members, and how that is expressed within the individual members’ minds. It turns out that widespread murder is inefficient and counterproductive; therefore we’ve evolved a repugnance for actively killing other people, and for those who do so. This remains so even when we can rationally see that we could do more good through the killing.

By the way, I think you should clarify what you mean when you say “these important things about science” – do you mean how morality functions within science? Or what science tells us about how morality functions within society? Because if it’s the latter, the Wikipedia article I linked earlier should give some ideas, or you could read the Book Reviews of a couple of books by Robert Wright (Non-Zero, and The Moral Animal; and I’ve not read either book, I merely know they’re fairly prominent books discussing these ideas, and the reviews of these books discuss the same ideas in a shorter format).

Sorry, that was replying to @140

(That’s why, say, British empiricism of the Locke, Hume and Berkeley variety is a specific set of metaphysical commitments.)

What does it mean to “underwrite” the stability and knowability of phenomena or propositions?

It seems to me that you need some kind of ontology and epistemology that can’t themselves be a product of purely empirical observation, or you have no grounds for putting any trust in scientific results . And it also seems to me that this has been a commonplace in the philosophy of science for a long, long time.

He, with his revelations, he has a coherent picture, and you and I don’t.

Speaking as one who had a Catholic upbringing, the idea that Catholic moral teachings fit even the most elastic definition of “coherent” is simply laughable. (Not that there would be anything to be said, either, for a picture that’s coherent and wrong.)

To call it ‘wrong’ in this context is a category mistake.

Not when it’s based necessarily on a premise in which there is no valid reason to believe. That’s as wrong as wrongness gets.

(And no, Douthat would not have a better answer than the next person. This is the typical drivel of somebody who retains a mushy-headed sentimentality about “traditional” religion.)

Data,
As I understand it, Douthat is saying that morality must derive from Revelation and from God, and cannot come from first principles. You at times seem to be saying this as well, though at other times you seem not to.

I am saying that, contra Douthat, morality emerges naturally, without Revelation or God, because it works. Social animals with morality succeed relative to those without. Because we have gained consciousness and language, we are able to go even beyond this and to build more elaborate ethical frameworks. These constructs – “memes” seems too paltry a word, and I don’t know the lingo – take on a life of their own within our culture, and probably help our culture to achieve yet greater success. Arguably this might even be part of why having language, and having a long, slow development of our infants and juveniles, has paid off for us as a species. With language and consciousness we can also examine troubling questions like the knock-a-man-to-his-death-to-save-five dilemma you pose at a higher level than is provided by the instincts evolution has provided us, and perhaps come to different answers.

In your most recent comment you seem to concede something, perhaps this, perhaps not this, but you nonetheless express an admiration for the ability of Received Wisdom (perhaps religion, perhaps not) to codify and teach a society’s ethical framework. I’d agree with this in principle – for all I’m not terribly well informed in this area I’ve found it helpful to read about Kant rather than to simply go by my gut instinct or to work everything out for myself. But I’d argue that relying on Religion to provide this textual instruction in Ethics this is a huge mistake. I’ve expressed upthread the problems with trying to take your ethical guidelines from the holy texts of my own Jewish cultural background; given that I’m an (Atheist) Jew you can imagine how highly I think of the ethical accomplishments of Christianity, and especially Catholicism, as expressed in practice. Yes, it’s good to receive your ethical instruction in textual form – but not as Perfect Knowledge From God, because it turns out that receiving your Ethics in such a form leaves plenty of leeway for you to slaughter heathens, or bash Gays, or just be a sanctimonious miserly prig. And as a dozen or more people have pointed out in this thread, once God is telling you to do good things, he’s often telling you to do lousy things as well, and it turns out there are competing ideas about who God is.

In any case, we now seem to be arguing about whether the textual formulation of Ethical ideas is a good thing, and I suspect everyone here thinks it is. Unless I’m very much mistaken, Douthat is arguing that such a textual formulation is meaningless unless it starts with Divine Revelation; I very much disagree.

Keith Edwards 153: “future-gazing is a result of secular science presenting evidence”

Logically and psychologically, wouldn’t it have to be the other way around?

Pico della Mirandola wrote that God instructed Adam, “Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have We given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world…” (Oration on the Dignity of Man, Rome, 1486)

Now yes, from the first the Church has resisted some of this stuff, indeed forbade about half of Pico’s proposed theses from being defended because they were heresy. But it is hard to argue that Pico, like Bruno about a hundred years later (and who was burned at the stake) did not begin in theology (and in Bruno’s case, hermeticism).

A little later of course, Bacon and Newton expounded true, forward-thinking, experimental science — and that occurred more than a hundred years BEFORE anyone had anywhere near a real idea of the age of the earth or how long humans have been around.

I may be wrong but I think that Catholicism had a sort of minor esoteric tradition in premodern times that the belief system was to be understood as metaphorical or allegorical, not for the laity’s consumption of course, (and the mystics danced politely around it, perhaps in mind of horrible ends such as that of poor Marguerite Porete or Bruno). I wonder if the rise of science and its enormous commercial success forced the Catholic story to become reified in the same way that matter and energy are real, and so cheapened the whole franchise, as it were. In fact, I would go so far as to assert that this was the true downfall, in a nutshell.

As to why there are “a bunch of Christians saying we don’t need to concern ourselves about global warming” perhaps Douthat should be put to work on that.

I have bad news for you, Data. If you tell a kid that murder is wrong because God says so, the kid will just ask “Why?”, which brings you right back to Euthyphro (and politcalfootball’s answer: “Shut up”.)

Your honest answer is actually a lot better for the purposes of making the kid think about and internalize the principle.

You’ve never met an actual kid, then?

Being in the process of raising three kids, I can tell you as an empirical fact that answers of the form of your “honest” answer above are much more effective than “Just Because” anwsers like “God said so”.

Which do, indeed, just invite the question “Why?”

But go ahead and dismiss that with a “Nah” too, if that’s what you want to do.

And Santa? Fuck Santa.

Martin Luther King was more important to the changes (for the better) in the last half of the 20th Century than any secularist philosopher. In the first half you could say the same for Gandhi.

And none of their ideas and actions actually depended on religious mumbo-jumbo. (There is nothing in their ethical systems that cannot be derived from other traditions, such as the non-religious aspects of Buddhism- which in fact influenced both of them.) Both in fact had very significant associates (what, you think they magically did everything by themselves?) who were crucial to their impact and who did not at all share their religious ideas. Which leaves very little of your supposed point intact.

If the poetry of X was music,
So that it came to him of its own,
Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,
Or chosen quickly, in a freedom
That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man
Too exactly himself, and that there are words
Better without an author, without a poet,

Or having a separate author, a different poet,
An accretion from ourselves, intelligent
Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

At a distance, a secondary expositor,
A being of sound, whom one does not approach
Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence
Clarified. It is silence made dirtier.
It is more than an imitation for the ear.

He lacks this venerable complication.
His poems are not of the second part of life.
They do not make the visible a little hard

To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind
Or peculiar horns, themselves eked out
By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

We do not say ourselves like that in poems.
We say ourselves in syllables that rise
From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

What sort of moral imperative does your verbose self-importance imply?

What sort of moral imperative does your verbose self-importance imply?

Can you say “projection”?

Everybody wants and doesn’t want a whole lot of things, so what. And when you talk about that license, is that a metaphysical license? Who issues the license?

Ashbery’s Syringa is one of my favorite poems because I see it as meaningful.

The word “meaningful” is doing too much work here. Few things are as meaningful to me (in one sense) as, say, Mahler’s 6th Symphony, but this is not the same kind of meaning that inheres in the sentence “My car is parked in lot #3”.

I believe ‘secular Buddhism’ is the Indian variety, often called ‘clarified buddha’.

Re Buddhism, this book is succinct and learned.

If your car happens to be parked in lot 3 of a particular car park that expression does seem to have semantic content to me, albeit of a kind of shorthand.
Why do you think, if true, the statement is without semantic content?

Why do you think, if true, the statement is without semantic content?

I said exactly the opposite of that. That sentence obviously has a very definite semantic content in a way that a piece 0f music, or the kind of poem that can’t be paraphrased, doesn’t, even though in another, more emotive sense it can be very meaningful indeed.

Anyway, that poetry (or fiction, etc.) has no semantic content is a much stronger and I think much more controversial claim.

And for the record, not one I would make, even about music (which certainly has that kind of “as if” semantic content.)

The lonely mating hoot of the spotted troll rolls in echoes across the marshlands – ‘why is no-one listening to me?’

Whoa, Steve, this is not like you at all. Getting soft, eh?

185, that is, the first phrase.

If Douthat’s fans want to defend him on the basis that his essays have the same kind of meaning as “let the world say, his most wise music stole nothing from death,” that’s fine with me. Let’s read poetry as poetry and non-poetry as non-poetry–there’s no call to valorize “poetry” over “prose,” is there? It might not be fine with Douthat, though, since I think he’s claiming for himself the kind of logical consistency the OP says he is (and I doubt he shares Shelley’s politics or his views on poets).

178: I believe ‘secular Buddhism’ is the Indian variety, often called ‘clarified buddha’.

Ghee-whiz, Niall. That’s a groaner.

Also meant to add that if buddhism is not ‘atheistic’, does that mean we should call it ‘theistic’? Monotheistic? Non-deistic? ‘God’ or ‘divine’ etc can cover a lot of different things.

(By “tangential,” I mean to say that I was disagreeing solely with the detail about Euthyphro and not staking out a position about the rest of your original post.)

only just now caught the “Ghee-whiz” in Doctor Slack’s #194.

It paneers to be a joke.

okay okay, no need for (groan) comments. I’m groaning myself.

‘Epistemic’ rather than directly epistemological might have been better.

Mattski makes a good point. But not all moral/law codes have one class of people. The Mosaic law code sets up a system of hereditary priests with special powers and restrictions. No matter how basic the moral principal you advocate is, the question is “why is it moral?”. You have to define morality in a particular way to justify your system of morals. For Douthaut this is the Euthyphro problem: God has to be moral for that to work, but then how do we know he is moral? Is it just a vacuous statement? Even Kant has to tackle this problem when giving the categorical imperative, ultimately equating morality and freedom.

mattski – you seem to be confusing concepts of good and bad with understandings of many contemporary political processes (eg. parliamentary majorities are empowered to enact laws under varied structural circumstances). In more hierarchical cultural structures this may differ.
Further, even in contemporary European or European influenced polities one person is quite likely to disagree with another, let alone with several others, about what constitutes good, bad and neutral acts. In the lack of an absolute or even majority (necessarily static?) social agreement on what is good and bad, one must fall back on one’s own faith or reasoning or, more likely, a combination of the both.

No, I quoted the Magnetic Fields to conclude that X ( Ferdinand de Saussure) despite de Saussurean linguistics and his amusing diagrams of heads talking to one another (at least in my edition)could be shot by Y (the ‘I’ in the song) – and that this could be and often is (but was not in this specific example) an actual event.

Such an event would be empirical data. However, whether that possible event was good or bad would not be empirical. Nor would the various parties (de Saussure, I, Holand Dozier Holand – the musical partnership-, and the various potential and actual members of the audience) agree upon whether the event was good or bad.

Doctor Slack replied correctly and in agreement in brackets @141 to my querying of false claims of empirical knowledge @134.

You are making one nomothetic claim, I am making another. We do not agree. You cannot prove to me with idiographic data that your nomothetic claim is more ’empirical’ than my own. Hence, we have each relied upon our own faith and reasoning.

Do you disagree?

“For my part, I am saying that moral claims are merely opinions.”

For my own, I am saying that actions can be good or bad and that this is not merely a matter of subjective opinion. However, I do recognise my own many deficiencies of judgement and knowledge.

That is sort of what I think – but there is little way of knowing within the temporal limits of our lifetimes whether an action will bring about less suffering and more happiness in either the near or long term. Sometimes goodness involves a willingness to sacrifice in one’s own lifetime, with the hope that this will contribute to a better future – but no knowledge thereof.

I also tend to negatively associate the privileging of happiness with utilitarianism, which might not be your meaning. I remember in a university philosophy tutorial the utilitarian tutor arguing that it was morally sanctionable to, in war, bomb large numbers of civilians working in a munitions factory. Only one other student agreed with me that this was not a ‘good’ or sanctionable action, but a moral wrong. To me, that same logic would justify almost any action once one group decided it was at war with another, including an event like September 11, or, potentially, genocide or other crimes against humanity.

Data, pleasure & happiness not the same thing. Drugs are a good example. Addiction to pleasure is a manifestly morbid condition. And widespread, unfortunately.

Emily, it’s been nice talking with you. I do think it’s worthwhile to examine more closely the way you are using the words “good” and “bad” in #210.

mattski, what do you mean – “morbid”? Pick a condition that you feel is the most wholesome, and I bet it can be reproduced chemically, and with addiction no stronger than that produced by chocolate. What is your objection, exactly?

(Fwiw, I think “happiness” implies a degree of freedom from pleasure-seeking.)

If that was some omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and well-meaning supernatural being telling me this, I might have listened…

Ha!

I have no idea what your deal is, Data. I’m certainly not telling you how you should live. I’m offering an opinion on the nature of happiness. I’m not an authority. Please, why don’t you share your insights. What makes you happy??

Did you grow up Catholic?

No, I grew up in a completely secular environment. But that was only one generation after God died; there’s still a very strong residual influence, I think. It’s not going to go on forever, though.