Ethics and The Existence of God

There is a popular argument for theism which is based on the claim that ultimate moral reality is dependent on. or best explained given, God. In this post, I want to explore what can be made of this argument and what the best way to understand this dependency relation is. Duly note that I am not particularly sympathetic to this argument, so this is as much an exercise in trying to understand as anything else.

First, what kind of dependency relation should we take this to be? First off, note that this is supposed to be an apologetic argument, so it cannot be simply the claim that all of reality depends on God for its being. No, something more must be meant here. A closer relationship between God's existence and moral reality is being supposed. The most popular way of making this out is that divine law requires a divine law-giver. This is sound as far as it goes, but many ethical views are reasonably coherent without claiming that there are any such thing as moral laws independent of our own existence. An Aristotelian view, which bases morality on what is good for creatures like us, does not require more than a recognizable human good (does this require God? Maybe. We'll come back to this).

Next, what about God as the best explanation for the existence of a moral reality? This is generally placed as an argument against an impersonal universe. So, this is the argument that random matter in motion could not give rise to moral realities. There are two possible reasons for this. On the one hand, one might view the processes which give rise to organisms on such a view as inherently incompatible with those beings having moral responsibilities or duties. On the other hand, one might think it unlikely that beings with the particular attributes which ground moral responsibilities and duties could have arisen in an impersonal universe. The former strikes me as conflating the ends involved in evolution with the ends of the organisms produced by evolution--simply because a being arose through selfish processes does not mean that the organism cannot have selfless motives itself. The latter sounds a lot like the simpler argument that consciousness could not have arisen in a consciousness-less world, which some atheists accept (many panpsychists are atheists: David Chalmers and Tom Nagel, off the top of my head).

So far, we have not made a very strong case for the argument in question. I promised to come back to the question of whether a recognizable human good requires the existence of God, however. This is where the argument has some strength. If you take all your goals and ask why you take them to be good goals, you must refer them to some further goal. At some point, one or more of your goals must stand by themselves, without reference to further goals. If there is no heaven nor any eternal guarantee that there there will be conscious beings into eternity, then our innate disposition to try to make the world better for those after us eventually runs out at the end of consciousness. If we make ourselves our final end then we will have to advocate a kind of selfishness, however well it may try to be self-effacing. If God or heaven exists, then our goals can reach an end in increasing the flourishing of consciousness. An alternative, and more orthodox, final end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, recognizing that communion with him is our flourishing.

But does this really show that God is required for moral reality? No, not quite. It does appear to show that some account of human flourishing as constitutively involving an other-focus must be true to ground moral reality--that is the form the orthodox final end takes. This may require God, but it may simply depend on our being communal beings.

Merleau-Ponty and Incarnation

We are embodied. This is not a generally contentious claim, but its implications are not well thought out. In this post, I want to sketch an argument for using Merleau-Ponty to fill in this claim and its impact on ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is famous for returning the body to philosophy, particularly in the existentialist tradition. His arguments push against scientific reductionism without holding the mental to be independent of the physical. This emphasis on our intimate connection to our bodies as lived allows us to use him to think through how our embodiment has and provides value.

Merleau-Ponty views the body as the center-point from which we live and discover the world. It is the condition of our awareness of the world. On the other hand, the body as center-point is dependent on the world--it must be an opening on a world, or it is nothing. The body and the world are thus correlates. We therefore must discover them together.

This is an important point: once we have accepted our embodiment, we must accept that our awareness of ourselves as active and perceptual beings (more accurately: active-perceptual beings, as there is little distinction) depends on our awareness of the world. We discover both ourselves and the world through engaging the opening onto the world which we are with the world which we open out onto.

In this active-perceptual engagement the world and our bodies arise for us as significant--having significance. The world offers us options in relation to the body, which offers us correlated capacities. The options the world offers others are options we know through intersubjectivity--our awareness of others--which, Merleau-Ponty argues, occurs through our bodies. We subtly use our own bodies to understand the activities of others.

This centrality of the body and its capacities for knowledge of the world and others entails that differences in embodiment result in different ways of understanding the world. Furthermore, the body as condition of action presents itself as a Good without which we could do and know nothing. The body constrains our way of being toward the world, and thus, while Merleau-Ponty agrees with other existentialists that we have the ability to construct our identities, and that what we do produces us, he nevertheless leaves the initial substrate outside our ability to choose. The restraints of nature, and particularly body and the culture we are born into, provide a basis on which to stand when choosing. These restraints do not inhibit agency but rather enable it. This at the very least puts the question of the validity of sex change operations into question: is it a way of developing the bodies we are, or a way of bucking the very condition of our freedom? The same kind of question may be asked of other transhumanist technologies, whether reproductive or otherwise.

The biggest metaphysical commitment I see in Merleau-Ponty is to the value-ladenness of things prior to our choices. Perception is, for Merleau-Ponty, the activity of answering a question from the world. The world offers us puzzles which demand solutions, and those solutions must form the world into a comprehensible form. The solution is demanded by the world, and includes the values of the things seen, its potentialities for reception of activities of various sorts. There are occasionally multiple viable solutions, yet not just any solution will do: it must guide our interactions with the problem of the world productively. The solution must, as it were, harmonize the world's witness. This means that form is necessary to the world's existence--it must be viewed as formed--yet form is a perceptual category, and so the world must be viewed as given perceptually, not as though the real world were a world of imperceptibles.

Once we have attuned ourselves to this notion of form, of self-sustaining orderings, we can begin to recognize much of our work as the work of producing form. This is the aim of every valid institution: to be formed in a way which harmonizes and preserves its parts in order to exhibit its form by seeking some telos. Likewise, we can see the environment and our bodies both as forms whose structure is self-sustaining and not to be violated without good reason. We will have to recognize the fact that we deal in these and many other cases with systems which are complex and which seek their own continuance until they cannot, and which then tend to decline rapidly.

Hopefully this post has shown how Merleau-Ponty may be useful to Christian thought on how to think about ethics in light of our embodiment, which we must insofar as we think of ethics in light of Christ's incarnation. There will, of course, be much to think through about what Merleau-Ponty gets wrong in virtue of denying the existence of a sovereign God, but there remains much which is profitable for our thought, and even where he goes wrong, he will offer a sympathetic interlocutor on many points.

Authenticity and Identity

If authenticity is to be a guiding moral ideal, we must have some notion of what a self is and how to identify who we really are. Introspection, by all accounts, is inadequate, even misleading. There are three basic approaches:

1. The existential option: We may observe the narratival pattern of our lives thus far and creatively extend it, calling future actions authentic when they help produce a coherent narrative.

2. The revelatory option: We may depend on Scripture to tell us who we are and what is consistent with so being.

3. The dialectical option: We may enact what appears to us to be our values in order to discover whether they are truly our values.

The existential option does not require there to be any pre-existing fact of the matter as to what we are. We create a self from our actions, and so long as they cohere we can call our actions authentic. Only conflicting actions--ones which pull the narrative flow of our lives in different directions--can be called inauthentic. Which action is inauthentic in such a case, moreover, cannot always be determined beforehand. It may be that narratival unity can be preserved by disowning either action, in which case authenticity will not guide one's choice. In other cases, one action stands out against the backdrop of one's life as out of place.

The revelatory option has a major flaw as an account of authenticity for anyone who cares about the usual conception of authenticity. If we look solely to Scripture, then what is revealed about us is not individual. Each of us is shown to be the same so far as Scripture's account of our deep nature goes: sinners in need of redemption, created in the image of God, and so on. Nowhere does it say what I, now, in my particular situation, am to do with my unique self. It provides bounds and principles, of course, but that does not fit with the main point of an ideal of authenticity.

The dialectical option is essentially an experimental approach to authenticity. On this account, we have a deep nature which is revealed in situations. We discover who we are by doing things and seeing how they turn out for us. This is very similar to the existential option, except it presumes that there is some pre-existing fact of the matter about who we are, so that we can be true to ourselves or not. Yet, this fact is concealed from us and only comes to light as we act on what we seem to know about ourselves thus far. There is thus an interpretive spiral regarding ourselves on this view. We start with some view of ourselves, act on it, then alter our view in accordance with what our actions expose about ourselves--our talents, desires, values, abilities, etc. We repeat this over the course of our lives, changing course a little bit with every action. Each account of ourselves being merely a hypothesis to be tried or theory in the works.

It will come as no surprise that I think elements of each of these three views are correct. Scripture does reveal who we truly are, and if we are to be true to ourselves we must, minimally, be true to the nature we share with all humanity. To get a fuller picture of ourselves to be authentic to, however, we must observe ourselves. We must observe what we have shown ourselves to care about and the traditions out of which we live. We should ask how we see someone with this life history going on to live, interpreting our life histories--which extend to before our births, to family histories and traditions of thought--through the lens of Scripture. We should then live into a preliminary picture of who we appear to be, ready to change course as it becomes apparent, whether through our own dissatisfaction or the advice of others, that the course we are on does not fit us.

Relations in Nature

I am half inclined to start by just gesturing toward Merleau-Ponty and various articles which have made similar points. There is more I want to say than they say, however.

First, the external conception of nature is the notion of nature as a bunch of particles combining in various ways, governed by various laws. This is all well and good. The notion goes on to view everything as reducible to the particles which each have a nature of its own, independent of other particles. Some people hold this kind of view in some domains but not others, but my concern here is with the trajectory of this sort of view.

First off, we are part of nature. We are thus equally subject to these laws of nature. This gives rise to psychological experimentation on motivation and grit, which, again, I am not against. The problem in this realm arises when we start treating ourselves as things. That is, when we start treating our problems as engineering problems, where we expect a five step troubleshooting plan to solve our issues. Most self-help falls into this category, as do many blog posts. Life becomes skill, rather than wisdom.

Next, nature becomes something to control. It is resource, problem, or solution. By viewing its parts as external to each other, we fail to recognize the dynamic systems which occur in nature, and imagine instead that we can simply engineer our way to a world built for ourselves.

By now it should be clear how nature is not related externally to itself. Nature is full of systems, from atoms to electrical circuits to the weather to the solar system, there are an immense variety of interlocking facets, where each part reacts to a change in every other part. By disrupting these systems beyond their capacity to accommodate change, we discover that nature is not infinitely resilient, but is constructed to resist us should we play god too far.

At this point it may be good to try to articulate a little more of what we might call gestalt metaphysics. A gestalt is a form. However, particularly in Merleau-Ponty's usage, a gestalt is a dynamic form. A system which holds together, accommodates changes, and maintains itself to some degree. Merleau-Ponty's definition holds that a gestalt occurs where each part depends for its properties on every other part (if I remember correctly). What I have been trying to sketch in these posts is the view that much of what we think of as independent of its surroundings actually exists in a gestalt and contributes the form of that gestalt. Our social institutions form a system which holds together and accommodates changes to some extent, sometimes reacting against threats whether we notice or not. Social groups collect in a way such that they can sustain themselves without much effort from participants. Even with means/end relations, the meaning of an action depends on the situation which provides the background against which the action appears as any particular action, and thus the action depends on its situation to be the action it is.

Society as Organism

The following is essentially a restatement of Hegel's views on society modulated through my own metaphysical views (which are, themselves, heavily influenced by Hegel).

The relation of people to society or each other can likewise often be thought of as an external relation. Each individual is thought of as a unit, in principle independent of others, free to define him or herself however he or she chooses. This lies behind our notion of how democracy should operate, the capitalist notion of freedom of exchange, and much of our obsession with personal freedoms.

Let me try to trace the ligaments of this a little more. On this model, each person is ontologically independent of others. One is who one is solely because of one's own decisions. Perhaps, of course, one's environment has shaped one, one's particular body has given one certain skills or impediments, but none of this is supposed to come into who one is. One is supposed to be externally related to all of these factors. You are supposed to be an individual, independent of your past. In principle, then, who you are cannot be essentially related to your community or any other obviously contingent facts about one's concrete existence. You must be free, then, to create yourself--and, indeed, reality--however you like.

But your creation is your own creation. It is therefore distinct from that of others, even unique. No one can understand the real you because you are not accessible through the cultural medium you express yourself in. Any mode of expression must be felt as inadequate because it expresses one as in a particular culture in a particular time, not as a free and independent individual. One thus inevitably becomes lonely, since one cannot express oneself in a manner which will feel adequate to one's self conception, and thus one cannot feel known in one's expression.

There are two attitudes one may take to these individuals. They may be basically good or basically bad. In the former case, restrictions on expression must be bad, and must therefore be done away with. In the latter case, the individuals must be restrained from hurting themselves. Generally, the view will be mixed, but this only means that the individuals will be treated as alternately a source of good potential to be harnessed and a danger to be restrained. The relation of government to people will thus be felt as that of regulation. There will be only either the imposition of restraints, whether for our own good or not, and the removal of such restraints, either for our good or to our harm.

Once we are independent individuals, we lose the communal ties which bound us together and provided a rich web of connections such that we could discuss issues civilly with other whom we respected independently of the particular issues. Overlapping communities provided ways of expressing ourselves which others in those communities could understand, but depended on the assumption that culturally situated modes of expression could adequately express us. As individuals, we seem to have lost that belief. We experience ourselves as beyond our cultures.

Still, however we may act, we are related to each other internally. I mentioned some about how men and women are internally related, although I cannot flesh that out thoroughly. We are also internally related to society in that our ways of experiencing the world are picked up from others. We understand ourselves in relation to others or not at all. We cannot find ourselves without recognizing ourselves in the world. This is way going out into the world to find oneself is such a strange idea. You are far more likely to discover who you are by examining how you came to views you hold, by tracing the threads which make up your life, and by acknowledging your socially situated perspective. This need not make one less confident of one's views, although it should make one a little more circumspect about rejecting others' views out of hand, but should rather give one a greater ability to articulate what draws one to one's views, what fallacies one might be making, and thus make one more confident that one has thought through one's views well.

Because we are internally related to others in society we are stuck with group affiliations, however much we may deny them. These groups metastasize into factions and oppose each other because each claims to be independent. Each faction wants to be seen as made up simply of free independent people who think rightly. Neither faction, therefore, can stand the other. This results in something like war, where neither side can recognize the other as right thinking, but winds up dehumanizing the other.

I have already said something about how thinking of ourselves as internally related to society and to each other may work itself out, but let me develop it a bit more. First off, we should think of society on the model of an organism, rather than on the model of a contract of people. This is a rather biblical notion of society, in that the Bible expresses often that the Church is a body made of many members who perform different functions. In society, too, there are many sorts of people, and not all have the same talents and skills. Not all have the same cultural background. If we want genuine diversity, we will need to find some way to allow for cultural situatedness to have a substantial role in society, to be validated. Hegel works this out be arguing for a form of government where different kinds of workers have different relations to government. I doubt that would be quite right. What I find intriguing, however, is his idea that each group, rather than geographical locale, should be represented. The details of how this might work today are, however, obscure.

The notion of society as an organism should help us discuss issues which disproportionately affect one class or one kind of worker. By articulating how our nation holds together organically, we can start to picture why all of the nation should care about parts of the nation, and thereby help move us to a place where we all care what other groups think, rather than hiding away in our own groups which we deny are groups.

The Means/End Relation

In this post I will likely be drawing more than I know from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. I will also be drawing from others, however. The aim is to show how we think of the means/end relation as external, how that works out in practice, how it is an inaccurate way of thinking of the relation, and how we should think instead.

First, what does it mean for the means/end relation to be external? It would mean that any action we might do is only externally, contingently related to its effects. Such a conception can work out in one of two main ways. Either it is only the thought that counts, and what happens from there is inconsequential, or the actions are evaluated solely in terms of their effects. There are also middle grounds, where the intentions are weighed against the consequences.

This lies behind a particular kind of reasoning, called calculative reasoning, where I act for the sake of some goal in such a way that I select my aims simply to achieve the goal. The means do not matter so long as they achieve the maximum of the specified goal, whatever that goal might be. It also lies behind a particular kind of justification or excuse, where one apologizes only for the effects, refusing to accept that one may have done something really wrong because one "didn't mean it."

If I understand contemporary critiques of capitalism, they tend to rely on a critique of calculative reasoning, whereby this kind of external relation of goals to means whereby we seek to achieve them results in a flattening of the moral imagination and of the kinds of goods we can be sensitive to. Money becomes the symbol of commensurable values, and thus money gain is to be maximized at any cost. This results in the loss of non-monetizable goods, such as community and virtue. My point in bringing this up is that it won't be enough to shift away from seeing money as the medium of exchange of all values, thereby excluding non-monetizable goods, but the underlying problem is calculative reasoning about goods.

What, then, would it look like to think of the means/end relation as an internal relation? MacIntyre talks about goods internal to practices, where the good one is after is inseparable from the practice. The fun one has playing chess is inseparable from actually playing chess, as his famous example goes. This can be extended, however. The Hegelian way of articulating this is to talk of the means as the end in motion, or the end as the means at rest. In this way of thinking, the means have to fit the end, they have to be fulfilled by the end. The kind of action which the means is has to be the sort of thing which can come to rest in the end, the kind of behavior which will not tend to extend itself beyond the intended consequences. Similarly, the intent has to become embodied in action which aptly expresses it and brings it to fulfillment. One cannot sacrifice one's goal in pursuit of one's goal, in other words. One cannot oppress others for the sake of freedom or vote for a vicious person in order to preserve virtue.

Relations Internal and External

In this post I want to try to explain the concepts of internally related and externally related things and how they differ.

When two things are internally related, understanding one requires understanding the other. If two concepts are internally related, then one simply cannot really understand one of the concepts without understanding the other. Black and white, male and female, up and down, are all cases of internally related concepts, in this case, related via opposition. Some things are internally related in other ways, however. A tree and the seed from which it sprouted or the seed it spawned are internally related in that one does not really understand a tree without understanding the life cycle of a tree. Male and female are internally related not only by contrasting, but by being formed in such a way that their organs go together in a natural manner. One cannot understand manhood apart from womanhood not only because manhood excludes womanhood but because manhood presupposes womanhood for its subsistence.

When two things are externally related, they exist simply alongside each other. They may be related, as when an apple rests on a desk, but they are so only contingently. It is extraneous to what they are that they are related. A finger and the hammer which hits it are externally related. I do not need to understand anything about a hammer to understand a finger, nor a finger to understand a hammer. A world without hammers could have fingers in just the same way as ours does (granted, not having fingers might alter how we constructed hammers, but I think the point is clear).

There are a variety of phenomena which are internally related but which we have been trained to think of as externally related. The means/end relation is one, the relation of people to society is another, and the relations of various parts of nature is a third. I will spend a post analyzing how thinking of these as external relations works itself out, why they are actually internally related and what that means in each case, and at least a gesture in the direction of how thinking about them correctly might work out.