A few hiatus-breaking thoughts on whether moral realism is compatible with a strong belief in evolution and materialism. Briefly: moral realism is the idea that the moral status that attaches to certain actions is a feature of the universe ("real") and thus not open to interpretation--e.g. killing someone is always wrong, because that's just what killing is; evolutionary materialism is the idea that there exist only physical objects, some of which develop over time without any particular end in mind aside from continued survival. The tension, then, is that objective judgments of good and bad, which moral realism promises, have to actually exist somewhere, and the average materialist account can't specify exactly where. And this is most certainly true: most people's moral beliefs have a certain level of inflexibility (which is good), and most people can't give a coherent account of why they have those beliefs and not some others. But there are three potential issues with identifying this tension:

1. It always remains an option to bite the bullet--accept that unchangeable moral statuses are not compatible with materialism, and discard moral realism. This is the option of the philosopher Richard Rorty, who famously argued that there's not much of a difference, as a formal matter, between regular bourgeois western ethics and, say, genocidal ethics, just some slight differences in focus. Philosophical problems with this argument aside, it's not a bad position to take: you sacrifice the certainty of moral argument for a more passionate engagement in it: if our common, everyday moral language could easily be twisted into something we now find distasteful, we must be vigilant to ensure that doesn't happen.

2. There are forms of moral realism where it's less clear that this tension might be an issue. Utilitarianism, for example: moral judgments are real and objective measures of utility, but it requires no deep metaphysics to make them. There's always the issue that 'useful' or 'good' still requires some explaining, but if the argument is that in materialism it's difficult to make sense of abstract nouns, that seems to be a weaker position to hold. Nor is utilitarianism incompatible with rights-talk: all it requires is the belief that rights are not absolute trumps, which is a fairly widely held position in, say, contemporary human rights scholarship.

3. The third and quite likely possibility is just that the people advocating this combination of views are not moral philosophers and therefore don't have the argumentative dexterity necessary to see this problem. The issue, then, isn't one of deep incompatibility, but of listening to people who speak authoritatively far outside their area of expertise.

A Further Note on 'Going Slow'

In re: this, Ta-Nehisi Coates:

This paragraph is the American approach to racism in brief. Cohen can name the root causes. He is not blind to history. But he can not countenance the import of his own words. So he retreats to cynicism, pronouncing the American state too bankrupt to clean up a problem which it created, and, by an act of magic, lays it at the feet of something called "culture."

My rule of thumb is this: if ignoring a situation produces no adverse affect for me, it's a sure indication that I need to be concerned about it.

On vocation, moral responsibility, and a few other things:

This:

I mean, think about that. Taxpayer-paid employees of the Justice Department had direct and exclusive knowledge that there may be hundreds of innocent people in prison, they knew that flawed forensics in these cases needed to be reviewed, and their justification for not doing more as these people continued to rot in prison was, Hey, we did the bare minimum required of us by law...

But even beyond the problematic ethical requirements, I'm having a hard time fathoming how no one on this task force felt morally compelled to go beyond those requirements -- to, you know, actually reach out to defense attorneys, or attempt to actually reach the convicts or their families. How in the world can you possess this sort of information, then still sleep at night, year after year, knowing that (a) the information obviously isn't reaching the people who have an incentive to actually put it to use, (b) you're one of the few people who could make that happen, and (c) because the information was only available to a select group of people, if you or one of your colleagues doesn't act, no one else will?

 Made me think of this:

Like Spark, Waugh attacks the Protestant and, by extension, secular - conception of vocation. Spark focuses more on vocation's over-reach - very few of us are equipped to single-mindedly devote ourselves to our work, and almost no secular work can merit such devotion in the first place, so in the end vocation is shown to be only sustainable in its Catholic sense of a calling to religious orders. Waugh, by contrast, points out its insufficiency - because it transfers the devotion that was to be reserved for God into worldly devotions - to war, or scholarship, or art - secular vocation is too thin for those who have a real vocation, which is to say, a vocation to the priesthood.

 ...and we can lump in the Joe Paterno/Penn State case as well to develop something like a theory. The idea is this: what Protestants (and the secular) correctly derive from the New Testament precept of the moral equality of all people is the equal moral responsibility of all people. Vocation, for Calvin and others, is a category that spreads itself wide because every person is obligated to act in a responsible manner at every moment, and the failure to do so is a moral failure; it may be common or human, but no less a failure for that. What the Protestant concept of vocation gets us is a specific account of the wrong being done in all these cases, where people believe fulfilling their legal or professional obligations renders any additional action supererogatory and therefore not required. In more theological terms: if everything is to be redeemed, then everything is properly a subject of vocation to the person who finds himself there. To do the minimum--or to expect someone else to do it--is a gross violation of duty. The difficulty with this idea is not that it's theologically incorrect but that--as almost everyone notes--it requires a lot from each person, and people don't like to have that kind of obligation (see also the Grand Inquisitor). But these people who failed and made the world worse because of their failure had it, and we have it, too.

On Penn State:

I've written before about the implications of the Penn State scandal, so I figured I should probably write something about the NCAA's punishment. In this instance, I think it's important to separate out three different angles from which the punishment should be interpreted:

1. The punishment: The punishments themselves are all, taken separately, reasonable responses to the situation. If the charge is that Paterno, Spanier et al decided not to turn in Sandusky because they believed doing so would damage the university's football program and its ability to police itself, then punishments that directly affect the most important aspects of the football program are merited. Football generates a lot of money: Penn State was fined some of that money, with the stipulation that the payments a. must come from football revenues and b. cannot affect the funding of other sports. Paterno's quest to get the record for most wins drove much of his behavior: strip him of those wins. The football program was overvalued vis-a-vis the rest of the university: allow it to continue, but not in a form where it can contribute to the previously poisonous culture (i.e. they can play, but only for love of the game). Most importantly, make sure that any student-athletes are not negatively affected by allowing them to transfer or leave the program without penalty. All measured responses. One might think them to be cumulatively too much, but that gets to point #3.

2. The NCAA: The NCAA is a corrupt and self-interested organization that only wishes to perpetuate its own power; this power grab was unprecedented, and it's troubling; the charges of hypocritical and sleazy morality are all absolutely true. And yet: the NCAA were the only people in a position to make these changes happen. This combination of damned-but-the-best-we've-got should look familiar to libertarians: it's the problem of the state writ small. The state is a morally contingent form of organization that just as frequently tramples on the rights and interests of individuals as it serves them (left and right can agree on this, I think); even so, sometimes the state is the only body with the authority to solve problems of domination in society--slavery being the big example. In the same way, yes, the NCAA is corrupt, but it's one of the few entities that can address the parallel corruption of individual schools. That it is an imperfect carrier of justice does not mean it cannot bring justice anyway.

3. Penn State culture: This is the most troubling part for me, even now. It's a Penn State-specific problem. What happened at Penn State couldn't happen at my alma mater because there are a sufficiently large number of people in Ann Arbor who do not care one iota about football and are happy to work against it. When the world's most minor 'major violations' were discovered at Michigan, it led to the rending of garments, full cooperation with the NCAA, and a sense that even the slightest deviation from strictly following the rules was completely unacceptable. The integrity of the football program and the university matter so much that punishment is accepted as part of the process of repentance.

The opposite seems to be happening at Penn State, even now: a complete denial of the facts, unwillingness to believe Paterno could have done anything bad, and the belief that the punishments now being given have nothing to do with the football program being out of control, but are rather attempts to tear down the Paterno legacy, of the "they've wanted to do this for decades, and now they have their excuse" variety.

There's very little actual contrition: there are pleas to remember the victims, as though remembering the victims and attempting to correct the culture responsible for the mess in the first place are mutually exclusive; there's an insistence that Penn State was always a university first and a football program second; there's an emphasis on graduated players, as though that matters, or as though it can make up for literally the worst college football scandal ever. They want to remember the victims and Joe Paterno as a great, nearly perfect, man, but those cannot coexist, either, and to embrace the reality of the latter is to deny the reality of the former. But it is a difficult thing to accept that something happens because, and not in spite of, the culture at an institution you love and cherish

Above My Pay Grade:

Brian mostly gets it right, re: Penn State:

SIDE NOTE TO IRONY: One of the more useful ways to cleave the world into halves is to split people into a group A that is suspicious of their own brain and a group B that is not. I'm in the former group, thus all the numbers and systematization and so on. You could add a third group of people who are suspicious of other people's brains but not their own, but they seem like a subset of group B with particularly frustrating arguments. Apparently this is a post in which I dispense personal philosophy unrelated to its relevance.

I think Brian is close to correct in his assessment here, but misses the crucial dimension on which people differentiate: the willingness to defer to the knowledge of others. What makes group A suspicious of their own brain also makes them suspicious of other peoples' brains, and therefore unwilling to believe anything without a confluence of opinions or objective(ish) facts--"For with wise council you shall make your war/ and in a multitude of counselors there is victory" as it says in Proverbs.

The alternative is the tendency to accept the conclusion of one's own brain, which includes the tendency to accept the conclusions of others as well. This usually takes the form of a false humility: not being smart enough to have figured something out, or not having devoted the time to a subject, or assuming that someone must know what they're talking about, or that people have a good reason for their actions, becomes a reason to accept someone else's conclusions wholeheartedly. A mechanism along these lines can explain both Paterno ("I figured the people who were nominally my bosses would take care of it") and his apologists ("He must've had a good reason to do what he did, even if I can't come up with one and a neutral interpretation would be massively condemnatory"), a way to avoid responsibility and avoid the charge that one should have taken responsibility anyway.

To be sure, this is not intended to reduce to a simple moral along the lines of "question authority," though, in a pinch, that will do. Instead, I think the Penn State scandal reinforces the idea that being a fully human, functional, moral adult is a full-time occupation: if you are not perpetually worrying over whether you are doing the right thing, or have done enough, then it's a sure sign that you are not.*


*If you are, for example, in a position to get sanctimonious about your own virtue, that's a warning sign.

On the one hand, I think Ross Douthat's argument here is pretty offensive, in its suggestion that secular morality is always and only reducible to Christian morality. On the other, Julian Sanchez here attempts to make the argument that moral reasoning never relies on religious thinking, or if it does so, it can only complicate things unnecessarily. It seems obvious to me that both positions are wrong: Christian moral philosophy does well to note the intellectual debts it owes to non-Christian traditions, and also that liberalism is not itself a debased form of Christian belief; the secular position does well to recognize that however optional the God thesis may seem to be now, it was (and is) frequently not perceived to be as such, and this may be something other than a millennia-long intellectual mistake.

Douthat:

Indeed, it’s completely obvious that absent the Christian faith, there would be no liberalism at all. No ideal of universal human rights without Jesus’ radical upending of social hierarchies (including his death alongside common criminals on the cross). No separation of church and state without the gospels’ “render unto Caesar” and St. Augustine’s two cities. No liberal confidence about the march of historical progress without the Judeo-Christian interpretation of history as an unfolding story rather than an endlessly repeating wheel.

And what’s more, to me, contemporary liberals’ obsession with the supposed backwardness of Christian sexual ethics—an obsession that far outstrips sex’s actual role in the preaching and practice of Christian faith—reflects a subconscious liberal knowledge that Christianity is their theological mother, and they’re its half-rebellious child. You can see in it the child’s characteristic desire to finally overthrow the last bastion of parental authority, joined to a continued desire for the parent’s approval for their choices and beliefs.

It's not completely obvious to me: Douthat wants to reduce the entire history of ethics to Christian ethics, and conservative Catholic ethics, at that. But it seems to me just as easy to get liberalism out of, say, Judaism (see Walzer's Exodus and Revolution as a test case), or, as Peter Euben has argued, out of Greek drama. Not a straight path historically, but not entirely out of the question either. And this is to say nothing of the actual influence of Jewish, Islamic, Greek, and other modes of thought, without which quote-unquote 'Christian' ethics would not have some of their characteristic features (see, e.g., 'virtue ethics'). And, yet further, while some of the founding figures of liberalism were certainly Christians--Locke springs to mind--they were certainly not orthodox Christians, or at least not orthodox in the sense Douthat wants. And let's not even talk about, say, Spinoza. The idea that much of liberalism emerges out of Christianity seems to me to be correct; the claim that this means it is nothing but a weakened form of Christianity seems obviously wrong.

Sanchez:

Ross is certainly correct that we owe a debt to thinkers in the Christian tradition—who in turn owe one to pagan thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome—but it’s far less clear that the value of their contributions rests crucially on their theistic metaphysical trappings. Aquinas thought that moral law could be derived by human reason from reflection on natural facts. John Locke may have peppered his political philosophy with a generous dose of theology, but it’s not at all obvious that what was always most interesting and compelling in his arguments requires supernatural support. For that matter, Newton was famously quite devout, and thought the physical laws he described ordained by God. But it turns out that F=MA even after you reject that premise: Physical law (like moral law?) does not require a lawgiver. None of which is to deny there’s plenty of hard problems left for modern moral philosophers to solve, but they’re mostly problems that were obscured rather than seriously addressed by theology.

The Locke sentence seems to me to be an actual, no-fooling case of begging the question: by stipulating that it's only what is "most interesting and compelling in his arguments" that matters, and allowing this to be, one presumes, those matters of greatest intellectual interest to Sanchez, then it's obvious that this will not include any of his theological reflections because they are assumed at the beginning to be additions that obscure, rather than 'seriously address,' moral questions. Walzer, to bring him up again, has a sentence near the beginning of "The Problem of Dirty Hands" in which he says "if popular attitudes are resistant to utilitarianism (and they are), there might be something to learn from that and not simply something to explain about it." It seems to me the same applies here: if the greatest minds in moral philosophy for a thousand years or more think that theological matters have some bearing on moral matters, there may be something to learn from that other than claiming that they obviously have not understood the point of the Euthyphro.

Had a pretty interesting class with my freshmen today: a nice and complicated moral issue about which there emerged two distinct sides, who mostly took over the discussion in attempting to defend their side and argue against the opposition (and did so with pretty good and subtle arguments on both sides). Pretty much the dream, pedagogically.

We had been reading Norm Geras' The Contract of Mutual Indifference and a debate had broken out about whether we should judge the great number of people who were inactive during the Holocaust on the basis of their intentions or their actions. So I proposed the following hypothetical: suppose there were two German citizens in 1942, who were alike in all respects except the following:

Person 1 does nothing, positive or negative, with respect to the treatment of Jews.
Person 2 rescues, but only does so in exchange for money.

(to introduce a later clarification from our discussion: the money represents pure profit, not the cost of providing for an additional person, and their reason for rescuing was solely the realization of the profit.)

The question was: who is the better person? The class was split pretty much down the middle. It seems obvious to me that Person 2 is better, even if neither of them are exactly great, but the dissension was strong.

Follow-up question: who should feel more guilty after the end of the war? Again, evenly divided.

Follow-up to that: which person would you rather be? Surprisingly, the position was virtually unanimous that they'd rather be Person 2.

I suggested the possibility that those who had thought Person 1 better, but would rather have been Person 2, might want to engage in some moral introspection to resolve what seems to be a contradiction.

Via PTN, I see Bryan Caplan appears to be living in a different moral universe than I do:

The My Lai Massacre is now almost universally considered a heinous war crime. The Hiroshima bombing, in contrast, enjoys bipartisan admiration.

I mean, what to say? The most prominent pro-bomb view I know of, within the academic community, is that one can justify dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima only because it proved to be a means of ending the war in a significantly faster manner (n.b. also that it's much harder, though not quite impossible, to justify Nagasaki on these terms). Hundreds of thousands of people were going to die one way or another--hundreds of thousands at a minimum--and the only choice actually confronting policymakers was which method would be employed. It was a morally problematic decision that can be justified, if barely, because of the situation. And these are the pro-bomb dropping arguments. The anti-bomb arguments can be withering, see for example G.E.M. Anscombe's "Mr. Truman's Degree"; Anscombe differs in degree of intensity but not in belief from the vast majority of philosophers and international lawyers on this question.

To summarize: Hiroshima's almost certainly a war crime. If it isn't, it just barely misses due to some very unique circumstances. Either way, there is certainly a degree of moral guilt that should attach in either case.

But I take it this is not the real question Caplan's asking, even though he phrases his query in strictly moral terms. To address the legal question: why was there no war crimes trial for the decision to bomb Hiroshima? Some of it is certainly p.r. and relative power: the optics of My Lai were bad and inexcusable at a difficult moment in U.S. foreign policy, and a (non-international) trial for those who committed the violations had to happen as a matter of course once the violations were discovered. Similarly, no one was going to take the U.S. to court in 1945, if there were a court competent to hear a war crimes case, especially not after they just ended World War II, their actions morally legitimate or not.

But it's also not clear to me that there was any law that existed in 1945 under which the U.S. could have been tried. It's a fact of the law of war in long standing that you're not allowed to do things like intentionally shoot a bunch of civilians, and it's a feature of international criminal law beginning with the Nuremberg IMT that superior orders no longer suffices as a defense against a war crimes charge (though it is permitted as a mitigation of responsibility); the U.S. in the 1960s was a signatory to conventions to this effect; it had legal obligations that had to be met. It's not clear to me that there existed any law that made the use of a nuclear bomb illegal under the law of war, so I'm not sure it could qualify as a war crime.

In this case I think the combatant/noncombatant question is the wrong analogy to make: Hiroshima is not like My Lai in that it involved the intended death of civilians. Instead, Hiroshima is like dropping a regular but very powerful bomb on a city. For most of World War II, it was the case that bomb-dropping was an extremely inaccurate science: one would have to fly multiple missions in order to guarantee the destruction of a target (Graham Allison writes in Essence of Decision that part of the reason Kennedy scraps the possibility of taking out Soviet facilities on Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis is that the Air Force estimated needing at least three missions to take out each target, and that's with an additional twenty years of technological advancement). In fact, the only real guarantee one had in dropping a bomb is that it would probably not hit its intended target. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima is more powerful than any other bomb dropped previously, but by less of a scale than one might imagine: twenty or so times more powerful that the biggest of the British bombs. Details notwithstanding, the point is: one doesn't prosecute soldiers or governments from dropping bombs, because that's an expected part of war, and legitimate most of the time; and, if one considers nuclear bombs to be of a different class or type, there's no new law to cover them; and the provisions by which old laws can be used to cover new cases are not well-developed in 1945.

(The x-factor here, about which I admittedly do not know, is how the bombing of Britain was categorized by the IMT. One might well think Coventry was a good example of a parallel case likely to be prosecuted. But I'm not sure whether it was prosecuted, or convictions were reached, under War Crimes or Crimes Against Peace counts. Because the U.S. was fighting, under the terms of international law, a war of defense against an unwarranted act of aggression. So if it's included, but included under crimes against peace, there'd be no comparable analogy to the U.S. If it's included as a war crime it'd matter if it becomes a war crime as part of an aggressive war or is a crime as such.)

This induced a chortle:

At the heart of ethical theory are issues that seem inescapable, and that no other field of inquiry promises to answer. How ought we to act? What kinds of things are worth wanting? What type of person should you aspire to be? Many religious people suppose that there is an authoritative source of answers to these questions. They are not moved by Plato’s cogent proof that the will of a being, however powerful, could not ground any moral duty. Nor are they persuaded by Kant’s further development of the same theme: moral reliance on the commands of another presupposes that the commander is not only powerful but also good; hence those who obey must already have standards of goodness and be able to apply them to the commander. After the twentieth century, and the many who attempted to absolve themselves on the grounds that they were only following the Leader’s orders, this Kantian point would seem especially forceful. Still, even those who continue to rely on religious authority should at the very least concede that their preferred manual of ethical instruction is profoundly incomplete. They, too, need ways of guiding their conduct when their decisions lie beyond the scope of the commandments. They might benefit, as generations of religious scholars and teachers before them have done, from the insights of philosophy.

In the first place, it's not "Plato's cogent proof." It's the proof of a character named Socrates, whose purposes within the larger framework of the Platonic dialogues is left open to question. It is probably also worth noting that the 'cogent proof' was unpersuasive to the person it was directed at (I presume the Euthyphro is being referenced), and perhaps philosophy could learn something from this.

In the second place, this claim is left open to a particularly obvious rejoinder. Speculate that it is in fact the case that one is a religious believer of the kind who believes that the Bible (or other appropriate religious text) serves as a compendium of the rules for proper living--a point which, it must be noted, is far out of fashion in religious studies and popular religion.* But assume it anyway. On the one hand one has a text that is written by God, or approved by God, which enumerates at least some of the principles of how to live an ethical life. With what material does one fill in the gaps? It would seem preferable to attempt to discern the factors that drive those principles and apply them to uncertain cases. What it would not make sense to do is turn to authorities considerably less qualified to speak on ethics than the Divine is, who inter alia cannot agree on very basic facts like, e.g., how to best construct a system measuring utility, or which principles ought to function as moral absolutes. This is rather like saying that the best way to ensure my scholarly work is cogent and persuasive is to run it by a child of 10 or 11, who may after all be possessed of insights I am missing. In other words: just because a blind squirrel finds an acorn every once in awhile does not mean one should outsource the finding of acorns to blind squirrels.

To be clear: I have no problem with moral philosophy, and find it quite useful in thinking through some problems of political and social life. But if we're going to insist religion keep to its sphere, philosophy should keep to its sphere, too.


*In my own particular slice of Christianity, the popular view is of the Bible as narrative, which functions to explicit list of moral rules in exactly the same way that all narratives do: not very well. 

I'm not sure it would be of general interest--though given this blog's eclectic readership, who knows?--but on the plane ride back from my undisclosed tropical location, I happened to read a very interesting old New Yorker article about the atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima. The article is, in fact, the entirety of the August 1, 1946 issue, so it may require a university subscription to access (I got my copy through Duke).

I was reading it out of the conviction that it might be interesting for the students in my freshmen seminar, though I am always and generally dubious about the value of straight-up reporting, especially of historical incidents where the journalist is unlikely to have all the facts at their disposal. In spite of these (somewhat justified, it turns out) concerns, I will definitely be having my students read it. The article as a whole is constantly (unintentionally) foregrounding the question of why it's is being written as it is, which is useful in thinking about the way disciplinary assumptions underlay the work everyone does (and the wide gap between common sense views, journalistic views, and academic views); the last couple pages, in which survivors of the Hiroshima blast address the ethical question of the bomb (mostly coming out indifferent or accepting of its use; no one strongly opposed) lay out the relevant considerations in a more useful way than, say, "Mr. Truman's Degree" or some of the Dwight MacDonald writings I've found on this question.

A really excellent article on the Civil War from Ta-Nehisi Coates. But I'm sure you've already seen it:

For the portion of the country that still honors, or traces its ancestry to, the men who fired on Fort Sumter, and thus brought war, the truthful story of the Civil War tells of a defeat richly deserved, garnered in a pursuit now condemned. For the blameless North, it throws up the failed legacy of appeasement of slaveholders, the craven willingness to bargain on the backs of black people, and the unwillingness, in the Reconstruction years, to finish what the war started.

For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil. For radicals, the wave of white terrorism that followed the war offers lessons on the price of revolutionary change. White Americans finding easy comfort in nonviolence and the radical love of the civil-rights movement must reckon with the unsettling fact that black people in this country achieved the rudi­ments of their freedom through the killing of whites.

The unfortunate tendency of paleoconservatives to cotton onto the antebellum south as the source of all moral virtue in this country (and libertarians' periodic inability to recognize the evil of slavery) is not just politically troubling but morally reprehensible. There is no part of the south before the Civil War that is conceivable without slavery, nothing that it did not taint; the fact that there were white people who did not directly participate in or benefit from the slave system is no excuse, not in the face of obvious and unforgivable moral wrong (I don't think we'd be prepared to excuse a white person living under Apartheid, either, whether or not he consciously participated in it). This is not to say I believe in the collective responsibility or guilt of all white antebellum southerners, either: no one can be responsible for the acts of large and impersonal forces that stretch over time. Rather, each of those people has personal responsibility for the things they did, or left undone, that could have changed the system, or the law, or someone else's attitudes and behaviors, or their own.

A former Michigan philosophy professor (I think Dara had him for a class--he does philosophy of language) on moral responsibility. Worth your time.