Re: Values in a materialist universe
Posted by kit on 2026-February-5 22:00:29, ThursdayIn reply to Values in a materialist universe posted by diogenes on 2026-February-4 10:55:32, Wednesday
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What Dworkin is selling (without quite managing to say so) is a tepid liberal Christianity without God or miracles or sin or redemption, but with a vague hope that we can justify democracy and liberal capitalism and civility. It is weak tea, and I don't think it is likely to impress anyone. But he's certainly not the only liberal thinker who wheedlingly suggests we can still keep Christian morality now that we've killed God. Your ethics will always hinge on your metaphysics. What you think is good and valuable will always have a basis in what you think is ultimately real and true (or perhaps it is the other way around). Christians reject violence, egotism and aggressive self-interest (at least in theory) because Christianity holds ultimately that what is real is peace and harmony: evil and violence are not just parasitic on the primordial goodness but (in an ontological sense) utterly incidental to it. I don't think any thoughtful Christian "believes that the foetus is inviolable because that is what God enjoins" (there is in fact surprisingly little in the revealed scriptures about abortion). But an intelligent Christian might well think that a foetus is sacred because of the nature of the created world - because of the place of human beings in a natural order that we have not made and do not control. What is right and wrong, in short, depends on what fundamentally is. And our ontology shapes our ethics even where the revealed word of God gives no particular help. But for atheists, who understandably think that moral values all originate in human beings, the value you choose seems to depend entirely on your preferred anthropology. You say: "Humans are social animals, and our societies depend on trust in order to function; and we find ourselves with an original instinct towards the socially cooperative behaviour necessary for all to flourish." I don't exactly disagree, but this seems like a bit of a circular argument: in cooperative societies, humans act in a way that is socially cooperative. But if you are trying to make an argument based on the kind of creature that the human animal is, I don't really see why you would favour cooperative and pro-social values to ruthlessly self-interested and aggressive ones. I don't think many atheists have taken seriously enough the challenge posed by Nietzsche (Christians, say what you will, definitely have). On my view of human nature and human history, at least, the Nietzschean picture is far more plausible: we are not mild-mannered cooperative vegans, but ruthlessly competitive carnivores. It is not cooperation but the will to power and self-glorification that drives human societies: the strong do what they can, and the weak enviously plot the downfall of the strong. If recent history has muddied this picture, this is largely down to the brief triumph of Christian slave-morality. And who could be more pitifully slavish than Dworkin? For materialists, your values depend on your anthropology; your anthropology depends on your values. If you want people to be pro-social, you will generously think they naturally are. If you observe that people by and large are not very nice, your moral world will become darker and bleaker (or, like Nietzsche's, satanically celebratory). It is not clear to me how you would argue against another materialist who simply says, "no, you're wrong - human beings are not pro-social animals, and we don't need to trust each other - the human world is a battle of all against all, and only the strong and the cunning will survive." As a Christian, I think I have common resources that I can appeal to with my fellow-Christians to tell them why they are wrong (for instance) to support capital punishment or oppose reasonable levels of migration. We share some kind of common moral language, however little mutual understanding there may be in reality. But your preference for cooperation and public trust - while I sympathise with it greatly - seems to have no defence at all against the atheist or materialist who says to you simply: "No, the world is not that way. And I don't think I should have to act like that just because you would prefer me to." |
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