Abstract
In this paper, I argue that theists are extremely well-situated with respect to developing metaethical accounts that qualify as ‘robust’ versions of moral realism. In the first part of the essay, a number of metaethical desiderata are identified. In the second part, theistic strategies for accommodating those desiderata are explained and defended. The upshot is that, contrary to the received philosophical wisdom, there are good theoretical reasons for theistic philosophers to seek to develop metaethical accounts that ground moral facts in facts about God.
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Notes
I do not claim to be able to give a satisfying account of what theoretical robustness amounts to, though I will say a bit more about it below.
For clarity’s sake, I should emphasize that I am not taking a stand on whether or not Spong’s conception of God is one that can undergird a satisfactory metaethical account.
I have addressed these arguments in (Jordan 2009).
By ‘deontic properties’ I mean properties like moral wrongness, permissibility, and requirement. Whether a plausible theistic account of the nature of axiological properties—e.g., goodness and badness—can or should be developed is not a question I will attempt to answer.
It should be noted that a person does not need to be able to state all of the relevant platitudes, or even be conscious of them, in order to have mastered a particular concept.
To be more precise, these sanctions are imposed on persons who appeal to their own ignorance of considerations that we believe they should have been aware of. The fact that we believe this indicates that knowability is indeed a platitude of moral wrongness.
The reason theism does not ‘necessarily’ entail divine design of human cognitive capacities, and the reason that God’s perfect knowledge merely ‘suggests’ that God intended to create beings like us, is that (i) God may exist temporally, (ii) there may be genuinely random events in the natural world and (iii) it may be impossible even for a being with perfect knowledge to have knowledge of future contingent events. If all of (i)—(iii) are true, then the fact that God created the universe would not imply that God intended to create us.
This may be controversial as an interpretation of Asimov. Even if it is mistaken, however, what really matters is the point made in the next paragraph: if Olivaw were made for this purpose (and it does not seem unreasonable to claim that he was), then we would take him to have a reason for seeking to fulfill it.
Analogous to this idea is the suggestion that human identity is partly constituted by the ‘stories’ within which we find ourselves, and hence that we recognize that having a place within a story—a role to play—often gives us reasons to act. As Kelly James Clark puts it, ‘Insofar as we cannot locate our life within the context of a unified, coherent, and complete narrative, we may experience some sort of disintegration. Integration is secured only when one is able to discern the meaningful pattern of experience that links past and present with future... One may secure complete self-integration only through sacred or secular grand narratives that are sufficiently powerful for understanding one’s whole life’ (Clark 2007, 43). It is possible, of course, that we ourselves create such metanarratives or assign meaning to our lives from within. But what Clark and others emphasize is the importance of narratives as such; whether the narrative is constructed from within or has its meaning and structure imposed from without (as by a divine author) is beside the point.
Prinz himself asks whether evolution furnished ‘us with emotions in order to carry information,’ and suggests that it probably did not because ‘Evolution chooses things that confer a survival advantage’ (Prinz 2004, 59; my emphases).
So long as the theist assumes that God’s intended purposes for his creatures are not morally bad, it will not matter whether it is the strong version or the weak version of the Intended Purpose Thesis that is embraced.
This reference to ‘the considerations God intends for us to respond to’ is intentionally vague so as to be neutral with respect to different kinds of theistic metaethical accounts. Particular accounts may be able to claim more advantages than the generic considerations listed here; for example, I believe there are compelling reasons for theists to embrace DAT, and some of these might be appealed to in a more complete, distinctively DAT-ish account of the authoritativeness of morality.
The principal theoretical attraction of this move would be its ability to provide a unified account of normativity. The obvious downside is that such a move would force us to give up the widely held view that values as such constitute reasons. If it is plausible to believe that God intends for human persons to pursue what is good, then the theist would at least be able to soften this blow: it would turn out that we have reason to pursue what is good, though not merely because it is good. That is, the theist who maintains that normativity must be grounded in intentional states can maintain that the goodness of a state of affairs constitutes a reason for us to pursue it, but not that the goodness of a state of affairs constitutes a reason to pursue it independently of facts about actual agents.
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Jordan, M.C. Some Metaethical Desiderata and the Conceptual Resources of Theism. SOPHIA 50, 39–55 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0165-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0165-9