Morality, Autonomy, and God

Keith Ward

• Editorial: Oneworld Publications
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781780743189
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Ética y religión

Can morality exist separately from a belief in God? From Descartes to Dostoevsky, the debate concerning the relationship between religion and morality has raged for centuries. Can there be a solid foundation for ethics without God? Or would we be consigned to a relativist morality, where "the good" is just a product of societal values or natural selection? In this landmark work, acclaimed philosopher and theologian, Keith Ward, presents a revolutionary new contribution to this discussion. Reflecting on the work of philosophers old and new - including Hume, Mill, Murdoch and Moore - he argues that our conception of morality intrinsically depends on our model of reality. And if we want a meaningful, objective ethics, then only God can provide the solid metaphysical foundations.Carefully structured and written in Ward's famously clear prose, Morality, Autonomy and God will be an invaluable primer for students of theology or philosophy of religion. But more than that, this strident and controversial book is guaranteed to shape philosophical opinion for years to come.

Part I

FROM NATURALISM TO THEISM

1

BEING A MORAL AGENT

SOME SENSES OF MORAL AUTONOMY

In modern moral philosophy, there has come to exist a widespread view that ethics is autonomous. That is, as characterized in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, views of ethics do not depend upon divine commands, the dictates of pure reason, or facts of nature. Moral principles ‘stand on their own feet’, and are arrived at by intellectual processes that are proper to purely ethical thought. This is the sort of view advocated by Ronald Dworkin in Justice for Hedgehogs, when he argues that ethics cannot be supported by metaphysics or by God.

There is probably some sense in which this is correct, but the idea of autonomy is a very complex one, and there are some important senses in which ethics is not autonomous. My own belief is that there is an irreducible moral element to some widely held human beliefs. However, it would not be reasonable, when thinking about ethics, to ignore alleged divine commands, considerations of ‘pure reason’, or facts of nature, especially of human nature. I further think that it would be entirely reasonable to take the existence and nature of God, if there is a God, as a foundation for ethical thinking, in which case ethics would not be autonomous in the sense of being completely independent of metaphysical beliefs, and in particular of belief in God. I also believe that there is a specific and defensible view of the nature of morality as irreducible, objective, and authoritative, which is one justifying reason for positing the existence of God.

Those who speak of the ‘autonomy of ethics’ do not, of course, mean that we should ignore any question of fact when thinking about ethics. They usually mean that such questions, though relevant to ethical decision making, do not decide ethical issues. It would be ridiculous to say that, when enquiring into what I ought to do, I must not refer to what I am capable of doing – that is, to my capacities, desires, and feelings. I am an animal of a certain sort, with specific capacities, and I live in an environment which makes some actions easy, some difficult, and some impossible. In some sense, if I ask what I ought to do, I need to know what it is possible for me to do, what my capacities are, and I need to believe that I could, but need not, do certain things. I need to think of myself as a being that has knowledge, ability to envisage future possibilities, and the freedom to choose between them because of reasons that I am able to formulate.

These considerations prompt a different but closely related view of autonomy, concerned not with the nature of moral discourse but with the nature of moral agency. Humans, it may be said, are distinctively moral agents who can act for reasons that they themselves formulate, and who are not wholly determined by physical or social necessities. This sense (autonomy as self-determination) allows for the existence of many influencing factors and constraints on personal choice, but insists on an ineliminable element of personal choice, where the individual must take responsibility for what they do. I believe this to be a defensible view of autonomy.

It could well be said that being a self-determining rational and free agent is a ‘fact of nature’. It states a truth about what sorts of being humans are, and, since humans are part of the natural world, these seem to be straightforwardly natural facts. In that case, facts of nature would include reason-directed processes, free actions, and moral purposes. Some tough-minded philosophers would be unhappy about this, believing that in the end nature is just what the natural sciences talk about, no more and no less. What this signals is the ambiguity of the words ‘nature’ and ‘natural’. They could be taken to refer to purely physical entities and properties, which could be investigated by the natural sciences, or even by the most basic natural science, physics. Or they could be taken to refer more generally and unsystematically to the natural world in which humans live, including humans, animals, plants, and rocks, as well as desires, thoughts, intentions, and values. If one is going to include values in the natural world, there is no reason in principle why God should not be thought of as playing a role in the natural world too. It may be simple prejudice that excludes such a possibility, but the fact is that most philosophers who call themselves naturalists mean to exclude God, especially as a supernatural moral authority, in principle.

This latter sense is what James Griffin has called ‘expansive naturalism’ (Griffin, 1986, ch. 3). One way of marking the difference between these two interpretations of ‘nature’ is to say that the first is a reductive proposal that would see all genuine explanations as explanations in natural science, and all existent entities as in some sense physical or material and nothing more. The second interpretation would not insist on such reduction, and might even think it impossible to carry out. It would be more sympathetic to there being many levels of explanation, and with there being emergent properties (most obviously, such things as desires, thoughts, and feelings) arising from a complex integrated material substratum. The force of the word ‘natural’ on this interpretation is hard to pin down, but is probably meant to stress the fact that there is only one world, one reality, not two distinct worlds, one of matter and the other of spirit, connected in some mysterious way. Furthermore, the material substratum is probably seen as the primary causal generator of all other properties, however emergent they may be. That addition would rule out God, though belief in the causal primacy of the material must be more a theoretical hypothesis than an experiential observation.

If one says that humans are autonomous, in the sense of self-determining, this looks like an anti-reductionist move – not all human behaviour is explicable purely in terms of physics, for example. At the same time, ‘being self-determining’ can be seen as a perfectly ‘natural’ feature of the natural world, since in it many beings may be self-determining to a lesser or greater extent. I suppose that, for moral autonomy to be meaningfully asserted, it would have to be said that there is a level of interpretation and explanation of the natural world that needs to employ irreducibly moral concepts. And it may turn out that, in this sense, humans, though fully part of the natural world, are truly autonomous and morally self-determining.

There are interpretations of what it is to be self-determining that I would regard as implausible. For instance, if someone thought that humans could completely determine what they are to do, without regard to independent and pre-existing standards of goodness or obligation, that would be thought by some to undermine the idea of morality altogether. Or if someone argued that each person should decide for themselves what to do, without depending on any authority and without being influenced by any socially accepted values, that might seem to be unduly individualistic or even arrogant. So, the idea of self-determination stands in need of analysis before one can happily commit oneself to it.

THE IONIAN ENCHANTMENT

There are philosophers who would deny autonomy, even in the ‘self-determination’ sense of having a capacity for free and responsible moral action. They might deny that reasons can have a causal role in what happens, or that I am free to choose between future alternatives. In this respect, there are contested factual beliefs, beliefs about ‘facts of nature’, that are proposed by believers in autonomy as necessary conditions of thinking about ethics, in the sense of seriously thinking what I ought to do, how I ought to act, or what sort of person I ought to be. For believers in moral autonomy in this simple sense, the existence of moral obligation presupposes the fact of human freedom and the causal efficacy of reason, or reflective thinking. Those who say that all human acts are determined by laws of physics, that there are no alternative futures, and that, even if there are, reasoning plays no causal role in which possible future becomes actual must think of ethical reflection as an essentially non-causal epiphenomenon of human brain activity.

Such a belief embodies a particular view of what ethical thinking is. It could be, for example, thinking about the general rules of social conduct, which have been genetically programmed by their adaptiveness to the environment in earlier stages of hominid evolution. This appears to be the view that the originator of sociobiology (now often called evolutionary psychology) E.O. Wilson, in his more reductionist moods, takes in his book Consilience. It entails that, if I now ask the ethical question ‘What should I do?’, I am reflecting in consciousness the behavioural routines that form part of my largely inherited mental suite of behaviours, and their physically caused resolution into one specific activity. He writes, ‘rational choice is the casting about among alternative mental scenarios to hit upon the ones which, in a given context, satisfy the strongest epigenetic rules’ (Wilson, 1998, p. 199). There is a sort of ‘casting about’ going on, though this is actually a series of causal processes in the brain, which are not in fact consciousness -led or -directed. The conscious elements of this process are epiphenomenal, or not true causes. The process proceeds by purely physical causal principles, and is not directed to any end, much less a consciously formulated one. The ‘chosen scenario’ will be the one that satisfies the strongest epigenetic rules. An epigenetic rule is a hereditary bias of mental development (ibid., p. 275), which predisposes brains to act in various ways (ibid., p. 166). Thus, a process of rational ethical decision making is in reality a purely physical brain process whereby the most strongly established neural pathway – established in the far past of the species by genetic processes that were randomly generated and have been selected by the environment – becomes actuated.

Consciousness, intention, evaluation, and free choice are eliminated from this process. Or, if not eliminated, they are identified with physical brain processes, which proceed in accordance with non-conscious, non-intentional and physically determined laws, the nature of which can be clarified by an understanding of evolutionary adaptiveness. Conscious reflections and decisions have no contributory causal role in the process.

Ethics is still possible, and perhaps inevitable, as a matter of psychological fact. However, it is clear that ethics would not, on this view, be autonomous, since no human being is truly self-determining. Ethics would, in principle, depend upon, and indeed be reducible to, scientific laws, which are facts of nature. It would be wholly caused by physical processes and could be completely explained in terms of adaptive behaviour and conscious rationalization. Wilson writes that ‘“ought” is just shorthand for one kind of factual statement’ (ibid., p. 280), a statement about what society has chosen. Such choices have themselves been codified and selected by evolutionary pressures for survival. And those pressures are explicable in the end by fundamental laws of physics, which would show what behaviours are likely (or certain) to be selected in environments that are themselves physically constituted.

Interestingly, there are good reasons for thinking that a belief in human free decision making is strongly adaptive and therefore genetically deep-rooted in human nature. In other words, if the theory of genetic determinism is true, we will have, and will be determined to have, good reasons for thinking it is false. The theory will tell us that we are probably determined to believe that we are not wholly determined. I will then believe that I am determined (I believe X) to believe that I am not determined (I believe -X). I cannot rationally believe both these things at the same time. That, of course, is no problem for the theory, which entails that having good reasons for action is causally irrelevant, so it makes no difference whether it is incoherent or not. However, for those who think that incoherence matters, something will have to give.

In asking what might give, we might point to what are probably the weakest points of the reductionist theory – the claim that I am wholly determined to believe whatever I do believe, and that new information or thought can make no difference, as meaningful information or logical thought, to what I believe. It seems more plausible to think that I may have genetically based predispositions to form certain sorts of beliefs, but that new sensory information, consciously considered, can modify or direct these predispositions in various ways.

Wilson concedes that it seems implausible to suppose that all our beliefs are determined by purely physical laws. Though he sometimes advocates such a view, and says that he wishes it were true, usually he does not. He states the view a couple of times: ‘All tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible … to the laws of physics’ (ibid., p. 297). And ‘nature is organised by simple universal laws of physics to which all other laws and principles can eventually be reduced’ (ibid., p. 59).

This strong reducibility thesis is, however, subject to immediate qualification by Wilson. In the first statement, the expression ‘based on’ allows for weaker interpretations, such that there may be other factors in addition to laws of physics, though the laws of physics must form their basic substratum. In the case of the second statement, he admits that it is an oversimplification, but he still hopes that the strong thesis will turn out to be correct in some form.

If this is a hope, rather than a matter of established fact, then it is proper to question whether it is a fruitful, helpful, or commendable hope. I can see why it could be commended. What drives Wilson’s argument is a hope that science will turn out to provide one unitary explanation of how things are. This ‘Ionian enchantment’, as he calls it, incorporates a strong belief in the unity of knowledge, and in the capacity of the human mind to achieve such unity. ‘The world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws’ (ibid., p. 3). No ‘spooky mysteries’ will remain, but a seamless web of causal explanations will provide a complete understanding of this one natural world of which we humans are part.

This is undoubtedly faith, in the sense that it is a belief that goes well beyond the evidence, and may indeed be impossible, for all we can tell. That impossibility only incites Wilson to embrace it more fully, for he says that he loves ‘the challenge and the crackling of thin ice’, and the thrill of pursuing an exciting, grand, and intellectually bold ideal. I see the attraction of elegance, simplicity, and mathematical rigour in the Ionian enchantment. However, it can hardly be denied that this is a grand story of the universe as a whole, whose main function is the pragmatic one of inspiring scientific work and commitment, and which mainly exists as an ideal that is supremely worth striving for, even if in the end it turns out to be false. Thus it is that, as Wilson says, ‘science is religion liberated and writ large’ (ibid., p. 5).

It is a reductive story, leading us to reduce beliefs about human desires, consciousness, and thoughts to beliefs about material particles behaving in accordance with impersonal laws of physics. It leaves no room for the objective and real existence of beauty, truth, and goodness as elements of reality. It is therefore ironic that it claims to reveal the objective truth about the universe, a truth that is mathematically elegant and beautiful, and that is good (rationally choosable) largely because of the intrinsic satisfaction of understanding and appreciating that truth and beauty. The moral commitment to truth at any cost, to the importance of understanding the universe, and to eliminating superstition and ignorance is unmistakeable. This is a deeply paradoxical thought, though it is difficult to turn it into a formal contradiction. It is more like a conflict of opposing intellectual tendencies, one prioritizing analytical understanding, and the other focused on moral and humane commitments.

The Ionian enchantment is a faith, based on the huge success of the natural sciences, but facing major problems of working out just how to reduce most of our ordinary beliefs about human thoughts and desires to laws of physics. Like many faiths, it has some good evidence in its favour (largely in terms of pragmatic success), but faces major conceptual problems when one attempts to work it out in detail. If it seems inspiring to reduce all knowledge to simple, universal, and precisely quantifiable terms, it may also be seen as (literally) demoralizing and dehumanizing to reduce all ethical, artistic, and philosophical beliefs to theories in mathematical physics.

THE PLATONIC ALTERNATIVE

Maybe – and this is very much the theme of this first chapter – this is an evaluative matter, and not just a purely descriptive matter. Opposed to the Ionian enchantment is another, just as ancient and honourable, and strongly embedded in classical philosophical thought, the Platonic enchantment. It is not denied that the physical world is orderly and can be explained by mathematical laws. But it is asserted that beneath this physical world – not in another world but at the heart of this world and as its inner and true reality – there is a reality of truth, beauty, and goodness, of value and purpose. These elements are irreducible. They cannot be reduced to other simpler sorts of reality. They are ultimate constituents of reality. They in no way undermine the unity and intelligibility of the physical world, and indeed they underpin and guarantee that unity and intelligibility by grounding them in one ultimately intelligible reality from which they flow.

If there is, as Wilson desires, a consilience between the natural sciences and the humane sciences, it is more likely to be found in a view which embraces both without annihilating either. Whereas reductive naturalism has difficulty in explaining how consciousness, rationality, freedom, and purpose can be given a reductive explanation, the thought that elegant and unified laws of nature are physical expressions of one beautiful, elegant, intelligible reality is not at all paradoxical – though to the determined naturalist it introduces a superfluous and unnecessary (naturalists tend to call it ‘spooky’, to make it seem odder than it is) dimension to reality. We need to recall that, if the naturalist is a quantum physicist, sp...

Índice

• Cover 
• About the Author
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Part I: From Naturalism to Theism
• Part II: An Outline of a Theistic Morality
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects