Re: Values in a materialist universe

Thank you for going to the trouble of writing a serious reply. A great deal to disentangle there, but I think your barbs are directed to a proposition that I was not seeking to defend, for I do not in fact believe that morality requires any “justification”, secular or otherwise, or is even capable of justification. That was actually the point I was making about morality. But to return to my OP, the point was a defence of naturalism against Dworkin's notion that naturalism is refuted by the existence of moral and aesthetic values, which (so Dworkin maintains) are grounded in objective non-natural properties. My defence was that talk of objectivity is unintelligible, and that our values are personal. You are dismissive of Dworkin's defence of objective value, but not because you regard that notion as unintelligible (which was my criticism) but because you take it that a deity is required to ground absolute value metaphysically. Your rhetoric is very excellent, but what is your actual argument? How do you overcome Plato's point in the Euthyphro? Let us analyse what you say. Having attacked Dworkin for his “wheedling” “weak tea” that is unlikely to “impress anyone”, you claim that “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).” You expand this by saying that “Christians reject violence, egotism and aggressive self-interest (at least in theory) because Christianity holds ultimately that what is real is peace and harmony.” This is back to the notion that evil is non-existent, which I'm afraid is a proposition I find completely unintelligible. To me, pain is as real as joy, evil is as real as good. What could it even mean to say that pain is an illusion? If you want to use the phrase “illusion of pain” instead of “pain”, then fine, but the illusion of pain is both painful and real, so you have accomplished nothing. It is surely this that is “wheedling”, if anything is. You then muddle things further by saying that evil and pain are “parasitic” to goodness and “incidental” to it. Fine rhetoric, but what does this mean? In any case, it contradicts your first point. If only good is real, then there is no evil, and therefore evil is neither parasitic nor incidental, because it does not exist. We really must start using words with a degree of precision. Instead, all you offer is to carry the reader over on a tide of pleasing rhetoric. This carries on into your statement about abortion: “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”. This is mere assertion. How do you get from the fact that the world is a certain way to a moral conclusion. In short, how do you derive an “ought” from an “is”, something which Hume (and most analytic philosophers ever since) have held to be impossible, rightly in my opinion? Again, we are back to the Euthyphro dilemma. God commands what is good, but this is not a mere tautology; therefore, the good is independent of what God commands. But turning to the question of morality, your criticisms seem to rest on a misunderstanding, since I wasn't seeking to “justify” morality; I was arguing that it needs no justification, being an autonomous field. I was not saying that I could “argue” Hitler into morally decent behaviour, a singularly unfruitful enterprise, I should have thought. What I was saying is that moral behaviour arises from our ordinary social interactions as a result of a need for social cooperation and trust. This is an anthropological fact. If humans were just ruthless, power-hungry creatures, continuously trying to injure each other, then society would not exist, social cooperation would not exist, and morality would be unheard of. My point is that the moral dimension of human behaviour is natural. It is not something grafted onto a human nature to which it is otherwise completely alien. Humans are also competitive and ruthless, etc., but even this competition is parasitic on a degree of social cooperation, or there would be no society to dominate. My account was an analysis of morality; I repeat, it was not a justification, nor is a justification possible. The point of this analysis is that there is such a thing as secular morality, which your account seems to deny. A society of atheists could and would have a moral dimension to their behaviour, since social cooperation is real. Humans are social animals, not merely out of egoism (which would in fact be insufficient to support a genuine social cooperation), but out of natural instinct. And the content of secular morality, whilst it overlaps with religious morality, does not coincide with it precisely. From the standpoint of secular morality, which is basically utilitarian, many aspects of religious morality will seem like mere superstition. However, it seems that you imply that a logical justification for moral behaviour is not only possible, but only possible on a religious basis, even though you do not provide it; and you also seem to imply that without this basis, humans would be rationally compelled to engage in a life of murder and rapine. All this seems to me completely muddleheaded. Christians like to tell themselves that the only reason why atheists are moral is some residuum of Christian belief that they are too cowardly to discard, and you invoke Nietzsche as an ally. Nietzsche was a great man, but he was hardly an exact or analytical thinker; he was highly rhetorical, and on a number of issues he was very muddleheaded. In particular, the notion that morality requires theistic metaphysics is both anthropologically false and philosophically muddled. The onus is on you to show both that ethics has a metaphysical ground, and that this ground (in contrast to Dworkin's claim) must be theistic. You have asserted these propositions but have not, so far as I can tell, supplied an argument for them, besides the muddled notion that evil is unreal. You have repeatedly claimed that morals are grounded in metaphysics, without, however, showing how you can bridge the gap between “is” and “ought”. Despite the inevitable polemical tone of the above, I am grateful for your serious reply to my OP.