The New Pope, Liberalism, Relativism, Conservatism and God
Some assertions by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict the XVI concerning liberalism and relativism might warrant consideration. For example: "We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism...that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure."
If he continues to make such assertions, and if these become important themes in his papacy, then liberals might finally be forced to give some serious thought to the relationship between liberalism and relativism. The most important point to be made here is this one: liberalism in no way presupposes moral relativism. This is not a particularly difficult point to understand, and it should be clear to anyone who has spent even a moderate amount of time thinking about the issues.
Most liberals, like most conservatives, haven't given very much thought to meta-ethical questions about the nature of moral obligations. Most liberals, like most conservatives, say a lot of extremely vague and confused things when they do set out to say something about these meta-ethical issues. When conservatives and liberals do make claims about the moral foundations of liberalism, it is common for them to make claims that are interestingly ambiguous. The ambiguous claims made by liberals in this context are frequently ambiguous in a predictable way--that is, ambiguous as between (a) an objectivistic/realistic/rationalistic interpretation and (b) a relativistic interpretation. The ambiguous claims made by conservatives in this context are frequently ambiguous as between (a) an objectivistic/realistic/rationalistic interpretation and (b) an interpretation that presupposes some version of the Divine Command Theory of morality.
Some important points:
(1) Although some liberals say things that can be interpreted as being relativistic, this does not mean that one must be a relativist to be a liberal.
(2) Although some conservatives say things taht can be interpreted as presupposing the truth of the Divine Command Theory, one needn't do so to be a conservative.
(3) Since moral relativism is a hopeless philosophical junk heap, philosophically astute liberals will not endorse it.
(4) Since the Divine Command theory is a hopeless philosophical junk heap, philosophically astute conservatives will not endorse it.
(5) The astute liberal believes that the moral claims made by liberalism are really, objectively true. This is commonly taken to mean that these claims are rationally binding on us. That is, that they are non-optional demands of reason. Astute liberals do not believe that the reason that women should be treated as the equals of men is that our culture happens to say that they should. Philosophically astute liberals recognize that mere widespread acceptance or cultural orthodoxy cannot underwrite moral obligations. In fact, that recognition is in some sense what liberalism is all about. Rather, philosophically astute liberals believe that there are rational, objective, and reasonably well-known reasons in support of the claim that (e.g.) women should be treated as the equals of men.
(6) Conservatives frequently act as if liberals are the only ones who face puzzles about the nature of moral obligations. But conservatives face the same problems liberals face.
(7) In fact, conservatives who accept some version of the Divine Command Theory face the biggest problem of all. The Divine Command Theory is one of the most problematic, least plausible, and least likely-to-be true of all moral theories. In fact, the only meta-ethical theory I can think of that is as dopey as Cultural Moral Relativism is the Divine Command Theory.
(8) The failures of the Divine Command Theory are well-known. If you have forgotten about them, refresh your memory by re-reading Plato's Euthyphro. Although Plato is discussing a slightly different position there, many of the criticisms are directly applicable to the DCT.
(9) Though there's no time now for me to go through the failings of the DCT in detail, let me just end on this note: The DCT is simply moral subjectivism writ large. The DCT proper is merely divine subjectivism (or an individualistic version of divine relativism, if you prefer). According to the pure form of the DCT, right acts are right and wrong acts are wrong merely because God says that they are. There is no rhyme or reason to morality, no objective reason that murder is wrong, no reason that God cannot change his mind tomorrow and make genocide and rape not only permissible but obligatory.
The fundamental error of cultural moral relativism is NOT (as is commonly believed) that different people would be under different obligations. The fundamental error of cultural moral relativism is that it attempts to ground moral obligations in something rationally arbitrary--the whims of cultural orthodoxy. But the mere fact that a practice has become orthodox in a culture does not--cannot--make it right. There are evil customs as well as good customs--which shows that mere orthodoxy cannot constitute rightness. (Of course there may be some quasi-evolutionary pressure towards better and better customs, but that is an entirely different matter. Here and now we are asking what makes right acts right. If you think that there is such pressure, then you are not a cultural moral relativist. The cultural moral relativist cannot believe that it makes sense to say that customs become better.)
But the divine command theorist believes, in essence, the same thing that the cultural moral relativist believes--that moral obligations can be grounded in something rationally arbitrary--God's commands. This is the point in the argument at which the sensible theist will say that God's commands are not rationally arbitrary--that God is good, and that he only commands us to do that which is rational and objectively obligatory. That's a perfectly sensible thing to think, but if you think that then you are not a divine command theorist. Rather, you are (probably) some kind of moral objectivist or realist or rationalist who thinks that God is good. But if you think that--if you think that God would never command us to do wrong because God always commands the good (and if you think that those claims are more than empty tautologies) then you think that what is right and wrong is rationally antecedent to God's commanding those things. Consequently, you are not a divine command theorist. That is, you do not think that it is God's commanding something that makes it right. Rather, you think that right acts are right for some reason independent of God's commands, but that God--being good--informs us of what is right. He informs us of it, but he does not make it up.
God does not play dice with morality.
So no sensible theist is a divine command theorist. But if a theist is not a divine command theorist, then he has no philosophical advantage over anyone else. A theist who is not a divine command theorist believes that right acts are right for some reason other than God's commanding them. Consequently, such a theist still faces the task of understanding and explaining why right acts are right. If God's commanding them doesn't make them right, then something else does--and the theist is in no better position to figure out what that is than the rest of us are.
(10) Divine command theorists like to say things like "those who don't believe in God cannot make sense of morality." But this suggests (though it does not entail) that those who do believe in God can make sense of morality. Perhaps they can, but if so they cannot do so simply in terms of God's commands. They must be able to give an account of why those commands are just, which means explaining their justness without reference to the commands themselves, which means that they are in the same boat, philosophically speaking, as non-theists.
[Note: this was quick and dirty. Will try to address this stuff with more care in futuro. For one thing Ratzinger may actually be more interested in some kind of egoism or something than in cultural moral relativism. But at this time of the semester, it's do it fast or don't do it at all...]
Some assertions by Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict the XVI concerning liberalism and relativism might warrant consideration. For example: "We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism...that recognizes nothing definite and leaves only one's own ego and one's own desires as the final measure."
If he continues to make such assertions, and if these become important themes in his papacy, then liberals might finally be forced to give some serious thought to the relationship between liberalism and relativism. The most important point to be made here is this one: liberalism in no way presupposes moral relativism. This is not a particularly difficult point to understand, and it should be clear to anyone who has spent even a moderate amount of time thinking about the issues.
Most liberals, like most conservatives, haven't given very much thought to meta-ethical questions about the nature of moral obligations. Most liberals, like most conservatives, say a lot of extremely vague and confused things when they do set out to say something about these meta-ethical issues. When conservatives and liberals do make claims about the moral foundations of liberalism, it is common for them to make claims that are interestingly ambiguous. The ambiguous claims made by liberals in this context are frequently ambiguous in a predictable way--that is, ambiguous as between (a) an objectivistic/realistic/rationalistic interpretation and (b) a relativistic interpretation. The ambiguous claims made by conservatives in this context are frequently ambiguous as between (a) an objectivistic/realistic/rationalistic interpretation and (b) an interpretation that presupposes some version of the Divine Command Theory of morality.
Some important points:
(1) Although some liberals say things that can be interpreted as being relativistic, this does not mean that one must be a relativist to be a liberal.
(2) Although some conservatives say things taht can be interpreted as presupposing the truth of the Divine Command Theory, one needn't do so to be a conservative.
(3) Since moral relativism is a hopeless philosophical junk heap, philosophically astute liberals will not endorse it.
(4) Since the Divine Command theory is a hopeless philosophical junk heap, philosophically astute conservatives will not endorse it.
(5) The astute liberal believes that the moral claims made by liberalism are really, objectively true. This is commonly taken to mean that these claims are rationally binding on us. That is, that they are non-optional demands of reason. Astute liberals do not believe that the reason that women should be treated as the equals of men is that our culture happens to say that they should. Philosophically astute liberals recognize that mere widespread acceptance or cultural orthodoxy cannot underwrite moral obligations. In fact, that recognition is in some sense what liberalism is all about. Rather, philosophically astute liberals believe that there are rational, objective, and reasonably well-known reasons in support of the claim that (e.g.) women should be treated as the equals of men.
(6) Conservatives frequently act as if liberals are the only ones who face puzzles about the nature of moral obligations. But conservatives face the same problems liberals face.
(7) In fact, conservatives who accept some version of the Divine Command Theory face the biggest problem of all. The Divine Command Theory is one of the most problematic, least plausible, and least likely-to-be true of all moral theories. In fact, the only meta-ethical theory I can think of that is as dopey as Cultural Moral Relativism is the Divine Command Theory.
(8) The failures of the Divine Command Theory are well-known. If you have forgotten about them, refresh your memory by re-reading Plato's Euthyphro. Although Plato is discussing a slightly different position there, many of the criticisms are directly applicable to the DCT.
(9) Though there's no time now for me to go through the failings of the DCT in detail, let me just end on this note: The DCT is simply moral subjectivism writ large. The DCT proper is merely divine subjectivism (or an individualistic version of divine relativism, if you prefer). According to the pure form of the DCT, right acts are right and wrong acts are wrong merely because God says that they are. There is no rhyme or reason to morality, no objective reason that murder is wrong, no reason that God cannot change his mind tomorrow and make genocide and rape not only permissible but obligatory.
The fundamental error of cultural moral relativism is NOT (as is commonly believed) that different people would be under different obligations. The fundamental error of cultural moral relativism is that it attempts to ground moral obligations in something rationally arbitrary--the whims of cultural orthodoxy. But the mere fact that a practice has become orthodox in a culture does not--cannot--make it right. There are evil customs as well as good customs--which shows that mere orthodoxy cannot constitute rightness. (Of course there may be some quasi-evolutionary pressure towards better and better customs, but that is an entirely different matter. Here and now we are asking what makes right acts right. If you think that there is such pressure, then you are not a cultural moral relativist. The cultural moral relativist cannot believe that it makes sense to say that customs become better.)
But the divine command theorist believes, in essence, the same thing that the cultural moral relativist believes--that moral obligations can be grounded in something rationally arbitrary--God's commands. This is the point in the argument at which the sensible theist will say that God's commands are not rationally arbitrary--that God is good, and that he only commands us to do that which is rational and objectively obligatory. That's a perfectly sensible thing to think, but if you think that then you are not a divine command theorist. Rather, you are (probably) some kind of moral objectivist or realist or rationalist who thinks that God is good. But if you think that--if you think that God would never command us to do wrong because God always commands the good (and if you think that those claims are more than empty tautologies) then you think that what is right and wrong is rationally antecedent to God's commanding those things. Consequently, you are not a divine command theorist. That is, you do not think that it is God's commanding something that makes it right. Rather, you think that right acts are right for some reason independent of God's commands, but that God--being good--informs us of what is right. He informs us of it, but he does not make it up.
God does not play dice with morality.
So no sensible theist is a divine command theorist. But if a theist is not a divine command theorist, then he has no philosophical advantage over anyone else. A theist who is not a divine command theorist believes that right acts are right for some reason other than God's commanding them. Consequently, such a theist still faces the task of understanding and explaining why right acts are right. If God's commanding them doesn't make them right, then something else does--and the theist is in no better position to figure out what that is than the rest of us are.
(10) Divine command theorists like to say things like "those who don't believe in God cannot make sense of morality." But this suggests (though it does not entail) that those who do believe in God can make sense of morality. Perhaps they can, but if so they cannot do so simply in terms of God's commands. They must be able to give an account of why those commands are just, which means explaining their justness without reference to the commands themselves, which means that they are in the same boat, philosophically speaking, as non-theists.
[Note: this was quick and dirty. Will try to address this stuff with more care in futuro. For one thing Ratzinger may actually be more interested in some kind of egoism or something than in cultural moral relativism. But at this time of the semester, it's do it fast or don't do it at all...]
posted by Winston Smith at
4:09 PM
18 Comments:
What a theologian or philosopher might mean by "liberal" and "conservative" is different from their common political use these days. The terms obscure more than they reveal; indeed they inflame.
"Divine Command" may be applicable to Jerry Falwell, but the internet tells me that Thomas Aquinas rejected it 800 years ago.
The internets are right on that one. Now somebody needs to inform religious conservatives.
Well, there are generally relativist arguments for viewpoints that can be reasonably described as politically or culturally conservative. I think primarily of Alasdair Macintyre, whose views I sometimes lampoon (when I'm feeling particularly uncharitable) as "relativism is true, therefore we should all be Thomists." (there's obviously more to it than that; he has this whole thing about how moral terms derive their meaning from their history in the culture, and that at least in this culture, the history is generally Thomistic -- but let's not get into critique here). In fact, the general formulation of relativism seems to me to give aid and comfort to conservatism (although it by no means implies it).
Culturally, I think, there's a tendency to mash epistemology with metaphysics. Since most reasonable folks [ huge fudge factor, please ] are at least nominally falliblist in the sense that people who are absolutely certain about X (especially where X is controversial or arbitrary) tend to make "most reasonable folks" nervous, falliblist arguments (not all of them cogent!) are trotted out to combat that unsettling 'certainty.' With the mashup, these falliblist arguments are given metaphysical dressing.
Tolerance of other viewpoints, with limits, is one of the hallmarks of liberalism. Figuring out what those limits are is hard, and it's not surprising that someone who holds tolerance to be a value might slide into outright skepticism of the idea of limits. It's a mistake, of course, but it's not surprising.
I couldn't agree more TB.
Especially about the affinity between CMR and conservatism.
Conservatives often revere tradition, some of them to the point of making it constitutive of rightness. It is at least as plausible to accuse conservatives of being cultural moral relativists as it is to accuse liberals of it.
That's actually the subject of a fascinatin' upcoming post...
FROM wmr:
Re #5 above, would it be going too far to say that a philosophically astute liberalism requires that supporters of a particular tradition be able to bring forward "rational, objective, and reasonably well-known reasons in support of the claim" that the tradition should not be altered?
Does an awareness of the possibility of unintended consequences automatically justify resistance to altering traditions?
Good question. Now we're beyond my area of expertise, unfortunately. I'm inclinded to guess that you're right, though. In fact, I'm currently inclined to be sympathetic to those who are at least willing to put the burden of proof on those who would change the tradition, and for exactly the reason you mention. But I think we can carry that burden in many cases.
Somebody said that liberal is someone who thinks he's smarter than everybody who lived before him...
Something to think about...
The "classic" argument against the divine command theory is Plato's Euthyphro.
One of the neat things about the argument Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates is how it provides grounds to reject any supposed divinity who commands what even we mere mortals can rationally grasp is immoral (say, slaughtering a defeated enemy down to the last man, woman, child, even beasts). I'd rather die with some moral integrity than bow down to such a bloodthirsty tyrant.
The slaughter of the Canaanites by the nascent Israel is indeed troubling.
"Theology does not invent with its method intellectual reflections that one can believe or not - in such a case the Christian faith would be entirely a product of our own thought and no different
from the philosophy of religion."---Benedictus XVI nee Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Ergo, it's a mistake to judge theology in purely philosophical terms. Where in philosophy appeal to authority is a logical fallacy, in theology it is a sine qua non. The former works from the observable toward the transcendent, the latter the converse. (I would argue here that the modern project has dispensed with the possibility of the transcendent and made the observable, man, the measure of all things. Therein lies the rub.)
A theology, then, of the slaughter of the Canaanites is here. My best understanding is that the wickedness of the Canaanites included child sacrifice, and Israel was used only as the instrument of God's justice.
Still, if Israel or the Religious Right still saw its God-given duty to go around smiting Sodomites, none of us (me included) would stand for it. The slaughter of the Canaanites appears to be a one-time-only thing, and I for one would be more comfortable if it were an instructive myth, as the story of Job is.
On the other hand, I might pick up a gun against child sacrifice.
I'm really not looking for a drag-out here, y'all. I'm no Bible scholar. But just as it's crass to thump a Bible in a philosophical discussion, picking a few quotes from it and applying a philosophical razor to it without a proper appreciation of its inner resonances and self-understanding is equally improper.
If the end of philosophy is that the transcendent does not exist, then it is indeed at its end. Let us get out our calculators and determine the most efficient way for man to live.
tvd -
I'm not a biblical "scholar" either, but I am quite familiar with the book, and have a reasonably good understanding of the historical-theological context in which it was constructed. Job, by the way, is my favorite book -- which I interpret as an allegorical exploration of what later writers have called the "dark night of the soul."
The divine command theory of ethics, however, is not the same as biblical theology, even though there are obvious connections. And while many (most?) Christian theologians would argue that it is ethiclly imperative to obey divine commands, I think very few would argue that it is because something is commanded that it is "good." Rather, they would at least tacitly acknowledge Plato's inversion of the DCT -- it is because something is good that a divine being would command that it be done. To those who would say, "Well, a divine being commanded the slaughter of a community, so it must be ethical," I retort, "Well, the fact that this being commanded the slaugter of a community is prima facie evidence that it is not a divine being."
I'm 100% with you on that one, Bob.
Thanks for the very good discussion, folks. Since I have little to add to my previous, I took the theological stuff over to my blog, to which all are always invited.
Thanks again, and best to all.
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