Seversky
Posts: 442
Joined: June 2010
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Glaring Contradictions Kairosfocus Ignores #2
Here kf, as usual, berates "evolutionary materialism" (or whatever is the current pejorative epithet) for its failure to ground a morality in what is.
He ignores the fact that the morality he advocates is blatant Divine Command Theory with no explanation or justification of why God's moral beliefs are anything more than just another individual point of view.
He does, however, very kindly quote the relevant passage from Hume:
| Quote | | In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. (Hume, David (1739). A Treatise of Human Nature. London: John Noon. p. 335.) |
He also calls it "dangerously fallacious". We are not told which fallacy the great Scottish philosopher has committed.
What does stand out about what Hume wrote 273 years ago is just how well it applies to what kf is doing today, the attempt to glide effortlessly, imperceptibly and quite unjustifiably from what is to what ought to be.
The problem for kf is that he gives the game away in the very next passage he quotes from Arthur Moore:
| Quote | However we may define the good, however well we may calculate consequences, to whatever extent we may or may not desire certain consequences, none of this of itself implies any obligation of command. That something is or will be does not imply that we ought to seek it. We can never derive an “ought” from a premised “is” unless the ought is somehow already contained in the premise . . . .
R. M. Hare . . . raises the same point. Most theories, he argues, simply fail to account for the ought that commands us: subjectivism reduces imperatives to statements about subjective states, egoism and utilitarianism reduce them to statements about consequences, emotivism simply rejects them because they are not empirically verifiable, and determinism reduces them to causes rather than commands . . . .
Elizabeth Anscombe’s point is well made. We have a problem introducing the ought into ethics unless, as she argues, we are morally obligated by law – not a socially imposed law, ultimately, but divine law . . . . This is precisely the problem with modern ethical theory in the West . . . it has lost the binding force of divine commandments. (My emphasis)(Ethics: Approaching Moral Decisions (Downers Grove, IL: 1984), pp. 70 – 72.) |
What kf clearly believes is that this heavily-elided passage reinforces his case for a morality that has some sort of objective existence or grounding, that moral law is somehow equivalent to laws of nature and we are as much inescapably subject to it as we are to gravity.
Yet, that is not what the passage says. As quoted, it is acknowledging the force of the 'is/ought' objection and admitting that, without an 'ought' that can be derived from an 'is', there can be no supreme and objective moral law.
The last couple of phrases which I highlighted are what kf really believes. He attacks science and philosophical naturalism/evolutionary materialism/whatever for being amoral - which they are. They do not pretend to be anything other than explanatory methodologies. What he implies is that what he is offering as an alternative is an objective morality grounded in what is.
Except it isn't.
What he is actually doing is embracing the Divine Command horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma. Far from proposing an objective morality - this is skated over with vague and circular references to "inherently" moral views - his position is that whatever his god commands must be and is incontrovertibly right, atrocious shenanigans in the Old Testament notwithstanding. If you don't like it then it's hellfire, a drastic increase in the salt content of your body or "How long can you tread water?"
In other words, My Lord is almighty and that makes him all righty.
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