OF MORALITY: CHRISTIANITY AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Nato takes up my challenge to offer an account of "state-of-the-art ethics" compared to which "Christianity is passe." Well, sort of. He writes:

Meanwhile, 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, but...

Of course, he goes on after the "but," and it's a bit unfair to cut him off there. 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.

Nato states that:

Now, some Christian theologians drop a lot of the details and synopsize Christ’s innovation as the elevation of love over mechanistic, heartless law. Some of the more liberal brand even manage to do this without distorting the definition of the word “love” into something I don’t want in the process. The problem I find with this is that all of these theologians are heavily influenced by the Enlightenment.

I would make the reverse point: the problem with Enlightenment moral philosophy is that it is dependent upon Christianity, in two ways.

First, most of what is best in it 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.

Second, and more profoundly, the theories of Kant, Bentham, Mill and other moral philosophers were articulated and disseminated in societies that remained, and which were able to hold together because they were, largely Christian. In the mid-19th century, Christianity was beginning to be eclipsed in the intellectual sphere, but at the level of the populace, the actual rules that motivated the decisions of the masses in their daily lives, Christianity still held sway. 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 irony is that Enlightenment moral philosophy has, by most accounts, been realized most fully in the United States. Whether you like "natural rights" or "perpetual peace," "treating people as ends not means" or "the greatest happiness for the greatest number," your model will probably be that of the US, with its prosperous and free democratic capitalism (or maybe of Europe as rebuilt by the US after WWII.) And yet it is in the US that the Enlightenment has never broken the hold of the Christian faith on most of the populace, and it is precisely because America's continuing Christianity has spared Enlightenment morality from generalized societal realization that America has remained safe for those ideas. Enlightenment morality is like a vine growing upon the tree of Christian faith: it can begin only by wrapping around the tree; it relies on the tree but may weaken it; and if it strangles the tree, it is soon itself destroyed by the trees collapse. This does not bode well, by the way, for post-Christian Europe's hoped-for emergence from its present economic and cultural stagnation under the grip of a bureaucratic technocracy with centralizing aspirations.

Nonetheless, Nato offers valid resistance to viewing Christ as an unsurpassed source of morality.

1) First, he emphasizes that he "views all words through the lens of assumption that the inspiration of their human authors came from non-supernatural sources." Well, fair enough. As a believer in a supernatural soul, I think the opposite-- that all words come from supernatural sources, since inasmuch as we think and imagine and reason we are supernatural beings-- but I do reject the assumption of "plenary inspiration." It does not follow, though, that we should not "tease the sublime from a few sentences based on the idea that the person speaking has an extraordinary conduit to transcendent truth." I look for the sublime, for transcendent truth, wherever I can find it, and if I am much more inclined to tease out higher meanings from Christ's words than from those of others, it is because experience is shown that they have a way of perennially yielding new meanings.

2) Nato is smart enough to point out Christ's most embarassing teaching: "the world was going to end pretty soon, as Christ seemed to be saying in Mark 13:30-33 (as well as in other places)... it didn’t work out that way..."

3) Nato points out that since Jesus's teachings derive their authority from presumed divine will, they have no force for atheists:

If we endeavor to love consistently and thoughtfully, so that we do not reduce our love to a thin facsimile of itself, we indeed lead to many excellent insights. However, Christ offers little justification to the materialist for his directives. “Why?” we ask, and we receive back an answer that references God’s will - not a convincing tactic for those who fail to believe in God in the first place.

I accept Christ's teachings not on dogmatic grounds but because all my speculations, reflections and experience seem to come back to them, vindicate them again and again, each time revealing new depths of meaning, in a manner paralleled by no other words I have ever encountered. In that sense, I don't need the reference to God's will in order to believe them. But it's still hard to know how to justify them to a materialist. 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, 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.

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.

C. S. Lewis dismissed materialism as "a philosophy for boys." He was too optimistic: in the 20th century, materialism was held true by many very erudite men. And yet 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. Then there's free will. If I am told that free will is an illusion I lose any reason to believe anything, for choice is the most fundamental of all experiences, and if my information about choice cannot be trusted then nothing can be. Certainly not the senses, which I know for a fact can be deceived. But materialism implies naturalistic determinism and leaves no room for free will (except maybe some obscure sophistries rooted in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle).

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.

So why are so many modern philosophers materialists? The reason, I think, is simply that science has been more prestigious than philosophy for some time now, so philosophers have decided to defer. Scientists, for their part, are like Muslims in the late Middle Ages: once committed to a certain creed but with a taste for speculation and philosophy, they have turned into fundamentalists. Faith, the unreasoned prejudice that there is some order in the universe, takes a particular form in scientists: they insist that everything can be explained by natural laws, the sort of statement that can never be proven, as Hume understood, but never disproven either, as Karl Popper understood, because anything unexplained will only suggest that there are more laws to be discovered. Scientific materialism has had colossal successes based on this method, but none where man's thoughts and relationships are concerned (e.g. ethics), because this is the domain of the spirit.