Therefore, those who have no experience of reason or virtue, but are always occupied with feasts and the like, are brought down and then back up to the middle, as it seems, and wander in this way throughout their lives, never reaching beyond this to what is truly higher up, never looking up at it or being brought up to it, and so they aren't filled with that which really is and never taste any stable or pure pleasure. Instead, they always look down at the ground like cattle, and, with their heads bent over the dinner table, they feed, fatten, and fornicate. To outdo others in these things, they kick and butt them with iron horns and hooves, killing each other, because their desires are insatiable. For the part that they're trying to fill is like a vessel full of holes, and neither it nor the things they are trying to fill it with are among the things that are.

- Socrates, in Plato, The Republic, Book IX, translated by G. M. A. Grube

In other words, it's better to spend your life seeking the true, the beautiful, and the good, than wasting it by merely indulging the flesh. Here's a pictorial representation:



Any questions?

On theories of ethical subjectivism (there are various stripes: emotivism and prescriptivism are two prominent varieties), moral facts are not facts about human actions or states of affairs but about the people who view those actions or states of affairs. Thus when the subjectivist says, "Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad," the predicate "bad" refers not to the slapping-act but to something in the speaker's attitude toward the slapping-act.

In my own thinking on metaethics I prefer to think of metaethical questions in the terms of moral properties. Are moral properties real? If so, where do they reside? When we think of the question in this way it clarifies the problem that many people have with ethical subjectivism. If I say, "This tire is round," I am saying that the tire possesses the property of roundness and that this property is not in me but in the tire itself. It exists outside of me. I neither create nor facilitate the property's existence. It exists whether I am there to perceive its existence or not. The tire just has this property, and my own opinions on the matter are thoroughly irrelevant.

Now consider the ethical subjectivist who says, "Slapping unsuspecting pedestrians for fun is bad." The substance of her ethical theory is that the property "bad" is possessed not by the act itself but by something in the mental state of the agent considering or viewing the act. So it turns out that the subjectivist is not saying something about slapping people at all; she's just saying something about herself.

Here is an observation by Victor Reppert:

One interesting point about many ethical philosophies is that while they make no reference to a theistic God, they do seem to be grounded in metaphysics, and the kind of metaphysics at work is one that a modern naturalist would have trouble accepting. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are prime examples. Plato's moral philosophy is based on the Form of the Good, which shares certain characteristics with the theistic God, and which can be known through a process of recollection where we recollect what we were aware of in a pre-existence. Aristotle is based on the idea of an inherent purpose for human life, and Stoic ethics is a response to Stoic metaphysics. No one seems to be suggesting that ethics will be all just the same regardless of metaphysics. Even if a personal God isn't required for ethics, doesn't it seem plausible that at the very least some sort of metaphysics is required that most naturalists today would have a hard time accepting. Is it reasonable to reject what Kant called a metaphysics of morals?

There's a good discussion going on in the comments section of Reppert's post. I think Reppert is right on this. The old apologetic claim that you can't have morals without God is not exactly right. The naturalist does indeed have some philosophical options for believing in a true, objective moral system in the absence of the Lawgiver of traditional theism. He can be a Platonist, for example, and there are other cognitivist ethical theories that posit some objective ground of moral facts that fit nicely with naturalism broadly defined (see this book, which I recently started but have unfortunately had to set aside, for a nice roundup of the current metaethical scene). But Reppert's point is that the available options don't fit too well with "modern" naturalism, by which I assume he means the form of naturalism that is dominant in the sciences, which is very often physicalist in character. When you start talking about abstract "facts" on a naturalistic worldview - facts like, "A square has four right angles," and, "It is wrong to toss little Jimmy into the well for laughs" - you have to do some wiggling to claim that the facts represent objective non-mental realities. A naturalist can't put a square, for example, in a test tube and study it. He can't do it with the moral fact proscribing the tossing of little Jimmy into the well either. So if he is going to say that these things are real in the same way that the chair I am sitting on is real, he has to monkey with his metaphysics so that immaterial realities can co-exist with the material realities.

Here's my latest post at RedBlueChristian: On Voting for Giuliani: A Lesson in Ethical Decision-Making

This just in: a Syracuse economist is claiming that religious conservatives give more to charity than liberals do. This is intriguing, and it reminds me of a study from earlier this year that claimed that people are more likely to be happy if they are (1) white or Hispanic, (2) rich, (3) Republican, (4) married and (5) regular churchgoers. If these studies are correct, they provide powerful evidence that being a religious conservative has significant quality of life benefits for everyone involved. But of course all these must be myths, because as many bright beacons of moral clarity keep telling us, it is positively evil to hold to any religious faith.

[Cross-posted at RedBlueChristian]

I've just weighed in to an ongoing discussion at RedBlueChristian.com over the value of human embryos. Rob Asghar proposed a scenario to those who want to protect human embryos: if you were forced to choose between saving a large number of human embryos and saving a few newborns, which would you choose, and why? I've heard this challenge before, and it's supposed to show a flaw in the reasoning of pro-lifers. But it doesn't, and here's why.

In his sermon on Sunday, my pastor displayed this image on the screen. It was taken during Sudan's famine in 1993 by a photographer named Kevin Carter. It shows a starving Sudanese girl collapsed on the ground as she tries to make it to a UN Feeding Center a kilometer away. The presence of the vulture speaks for itself. Researching this picture on the internet today I have discovered a few things. First, the photographer apparently chased the vulture away, but did nothing to help the girl. Second, the girl apparently resumed her trek to the feeding center, but no one knows what became of her. Third, Kevin Carter committed suicide only a few months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for the photo.

My pastor's sermon was about sharing the gospel, and his point was that there are many people who are spiritually impoverished and dying just as this child was physically impoverished and dying. The point was well-taken, and yet in the moment I saw the photograph, the only thing that concerned me was the terrible physical plight of this little toddler and those like her. This photo is apparently very famous, and yet its existence had escaped me over the last decade or so. Being a new parent myself, the sight of this poor child - whose fate is unkown - collapsed naked on a rocky field as she tries to make it to a feeding center, alone, with her bones protruding from her skin, was utterly devastating to me. Here I am, in my posh middle class suburban home and my nice job, pursuing my dreams, with a beautiful wife and daughter, and all the while there are people in the world whose suffering is beyond comprehension, as well as being beyond their control. As a seminary student I obviously have my finanical struggles, but compared to the plight of this child and those like her I am obscenely rich.

On Rush Limbaugh's radio show (no endorsement or condemnation implied), there is a mock commercial that often plays about how liberals just want to make people feel guilty if they are successful or rich, as if by having money or affluence you ought to be ashamed simply by virtue of the fact that there are those in the world who are impoverished and dying. Well, yes and no. Being successful or having a wealth of worldly possessions should not inherently entail a feeling of guilt. And yet many of the world's rich (of which I am one, at least when compared to how most people live) should feel guilty if they are basking in their riches while ignoring the wretchedly poor. Or perhaps we can say it a better way: being aflluent should not necessarily involve feeling guilty, but it should necessarily involve a responsibility to use riches to help others. Not guilt then, but responsibility. Guilt should only come if the responsibility is ignored.

On that note, count me the guiltiest of them all. One reason this image so affected me is because I realize that I have been doing abolutely nothing for the world's poor. As a seminary student on a single income, finances are always tight, and yet I am fully aware that I could be giving more than I currently do. This is an issue that will take more serious reflection on my part.

One more note on the photo. It ocurred to me how ridiculously powerful a single image can be. It is one thing to cognitively know that there are starving people in the world, and yet it is quite another to experience that reality through a simple image. Images are non-propositional. A powerful image can be like a powerful narrative: it does not present specific propositional content but it can wed itself to propositional content ("There are starving people in the world"), thereby producing strong emotion ("This is a tragedy!") and set the will into motion ("I will do something to help starving people like this poor girl"). Postmoderns - and especially postmoderns in the church - have much to say about the value of portraying truths and values in non-propositional ways: through art, or drama, or imagery, or whatever. And while certainly we as Christians should always keep the statements of theology foremost in our quest for and expressions of God's truth, we should not forget the value of image and story. Jesus Himself often made explicit truths implicit via narrative parables. It is one thing to say, "Christians should care for the poor." But the bones of that proposition are given real, feeling flesh when wedded to an image like the one above.

In this article, a North Korean defector claims that disabled newborns are routinely killed in the workers' paradise of Kim Jong Il. I wonder if those nutty Marxists have been reading Peter Singer? Only in the schizophrenic world in which we live is the following true: one man's barbarism is another man's tenure.

A post over at the Christian CADRE blog touches on something that's been on my mind for the last few weeks. I've been reading through some of Plato's major works, and a short but interesting one is Euthyphro, in which Socrates grills a worshipper of the Greek gods on what it actually means to be pious or moral. In the dialogue, neither Socrates nor Euthyphro are able to come to a workable definition of the proper grounding of morality, and all of Euthyphro's ideas are shown by Socrates to be worthless.

I mention this because of a traditional problem in philosophy of religion known as the "Euthyphro dilemma," which you can read more about here. This dilemma stems from the following exchange found in the dialogue, with the most relevant text in italics:

Euthyphro: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.

Socrates: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?

Euthyphro: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.

Socrates: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?

This creates an alleged dilemma because (1) if God issues moral commands because they are moral, then the moral law exists above God, and this goes against traditional theism and the very concept of God and (2) if morals are moral simply because God commands them, then He could change His command tomorrow (from "don't rob banks" to "rob banks and kill all the people inside wearing pink") and abhorrent acts would then become moral. In other words, morals would be based on the arbitrary will of God.

This "Euthyphro dilemma" is supposedly the death knell for any ethical system that grounds moral imperatives in the command of God (i. e. a divine command theory of ethics). Even today, in many contemporary discussions of the subject, on atheistic blogs or whatever, non-theists act as if the issue is settled. Ethics just can't be rooted in the command of God, they say, because Socrates has already dealt with that issue definitively. (They do this quite often, by the way. We can't have any real knowledge of God anyway, for example, because Kant has already settled that! The teleological argument for God's existence doesn't work either! We know that because Hume showed it was impossible! This kind of thing wouldn't be so annoying if the arguments they were referring to were better.)

But I call poppycock on that. If we're looking solely at Socrates' argument, it doesn't even apply to theistic beliefs, and that's because the Greek gods are not analogous to the omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God of theism. The Greek gods - Zeus, Ares, Athena and the like - are more like glorified superheroes than God. That is, they may be very strong or beautiful or smart and have magnificent powers, but they are still finite. They are part of the created order, not the ontological ground of that order. Thus of course it's impossible for objective morals to be rooted in their command, and Socrates points out that the gods often disagree or change their mind anyway.

Now, for the sake of argument, let's suppose that Socrates was not talking to Euthyphro. We'll say he was transported seven hundred years into the future and was talking to Saint Augustine (who would have given a much better answer, by the way, than poor Euthyphro). There he poses the same question to Augustine: are moral actions good because God has commanded them? Or has God commanded them because they are good? Most sophisticated formulations of the Euthyphro dilemma simply twist the question and pose it to theists in this way. What is the proper Christian response?

Truth be told, I like this formulation of the dilemma better, because the solution is so much more illustrative of good Christian theology. Before answering, I have to admit that if one subscribes to divine command theory, and places the emphasis on the command, then the question posed carries much more force. But I see a fatal flaw here: whoever said the command of God is the ground of morality? If we're only focusing on the command itself, then we aren't actually going deep enough into the question of what grounds morality. In other words, we're not at the ground of moral grounding yet. We're still hovering over the surface.

The obvious question to ask is: well, why does God command what He commands, exactly? Answer: He commands what is in accord with His character. Thus objective morals are grounded in the nature of God: loving, relational, life-giving, sacrificial, merciful, gracious, etc. The commands that He issues only flow out of His character. So the truth is that God actually can't issue moral commands that are ultimately contradictory. So he can't one day tell someone to feed the hungry, and the next day to throw them off a bridge. God is the ground of all being and reality itself. The "good" is whatever is in accord with that ground of being - the personal God Himself - and evil is whatever opposes the personal God, not His commands but His character. In my mind this solves the problem. There is no Euthyphro dilemma.