by Kolbitar » January 14th, 2008, 1:52 pm
Dear Salanor,
I’d like to begin our discussion about the difference between our conceptions of “natural desire” by delving a bit deeper into a nominal point of agreement we share. Earlier you agreed with me that morality is objective if objective means “publicly apprehend-able”. A tree, for example, is objective because it is an object we can all perceive. On the other hand, the perception itself is subjective, for we each have our own separate experience of the tree. It’s true that I can talk to you about my perception, and in that way it can become an object “publicly apprehend-able”; in this sense we may say it has “second hand objectivity” -- but the perception itself is subjective. Now, when I speak of objective morality I understand it also to be absolute, absolute in two senses – first, in it’s universality, that is, in it’s general principles it is descriptive of everyone regardless of individual differences; second, it is binding on everyone, it is a rational imperative. In contrast, it’s fairly evident to me that your conception of objective morality at best is really only a “second hand objective morality”, which is to say no better than a purely subjective morality. Why?
In your view (I’ll sincerely try to do it justice – tell me if and where I don’t) laws are codified from a certain moral consciousness which permeates a particular age; a majority of people – or a sufficient number of influential leaders – share an outlook on what should and shouldn’t be implemented by law and impose that outlook upon society through governmental means. Whatever type of government exists, and whatever it chooses to do, well, that’s just how it is – it is, I can describe its existence, character and maybe even its origin (like we can discuss the existence, character and origin of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings), therefore, according to you, it has objectivity.
However, when we say “objective morality”, don’t we mean to say (like we don’t mean to say the Lord of the Rings is objective history) that we can do more than describe the morality of a given culture (including our own); don’t we mean to say that we can judge it by an unchanging standard – an absolute morality? And in saying that we can judge it by an unchanging standard, an absolute morality, don’t we also imply that this absolute morality is one to which each individual “ought” to conform? Now, your entire method -- and not just yours but Dawkins’, Hawkings’, Russell’s, and all such dogmatic natural scientists’; your entire method is that which merely describes – it’s the descriptive method. So, even if we can come to a general understanding about what type of ends at which a given government and morality should aim if it wants the best for the most amount of people, we still cannot say that everyone therefore “ought” to agree with us. We can say “if we want this end, then we can implement these means”; but, if all objective knowledge consists in merely describing reality, then we cannot prescribe what someone else “ought” to do – we cannot speak for someone else. If you cannot speak for someone else then, though you can say, for instance, that killing Jews for no other reason than they are Jewish is wrong for you, still, you must (logically) add that it is not wrong for other people to murder Jews. In my eyes such naturalist logic is repulsive and sub-human; fortunately it’s also a contradiction and there’s a way out, which I will discuss later on (and which entails, as you can guess, unfortunate implications for your naturalistic “natural desire”).
So, summing up the first part of my response: It is my observation that atheists, among others, use the descriptive method as their sole instrument for attaining objective knowledge – thus they neglect an entire dimension of human experience, relegating it to mere subjective preference; this, salanor, is the source of our difference. With this difference in mind, let us now go on to discuss why your view is, fortunately (or is it not unfortunate to be unable to speak for someone and say they should not murder children?), rationally impossible.
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All valid thought assumes the self-evident principle of non-contradiction. This principle governs reality, thus it is the first principle of the descriptive method. It is this principle, for instance, that makes it possible for a math teacher to correct a student. Interestingly, there is no democratic principle involved when it comes to the fact that two apples added to two apples gives you four apples, so that even if all humanity gets the problem wrong, you can objectively state that they are, in fact, wrong. Indeed, I can state – I can speak for someone -- that the person who says two apples plus one apple equals four apples is absolutely and objectively wrong: objectively because he is not correctly apprehending reality; absolutely because, due to it’s self-evident nature, no thinking substance can see it otherwise – it’s a mistake, rather, in judgment. Fascinating!
Now, we left off part one with a dilemma that needs to be resolved in the same manner that the descriptive method solves it’s dilemmas: we must be able objectively and absolutely to affirm that all human beings ought to act, or at least ought not to act, in certain ways in certain circumstances. In other words, the prescriptive method needs to be combined with the descriptive method in order to say that we ought to do such and such. However, as we intimated before, you cannot derive an “ought” by describing what is – with one exception. That exception can only be (as one may gather from my opening paragraph) an appeal to a first principle, which is self-evident (as it was with our appeal to the principle of non-contradiction of the descriptive method) – which, because of our inability to think otherwise, we are forced universally and objectively to affirm. And that first principle? Well, before I touch on the answer I want to preface my remarks with comments you’ve made to me in the past; these comments, I believe, will serve to highlight the lopsided nature of your approach.
In an earlier discussion I asked “why does the creature seek new patterns, why ‘does it extrapolate purposes and supposes other purposes’, why does it ‘construct meaning, derive purpose and ascribe value’, why does it ‘constantly re-evaluating’ things; when I asked these things you responded, in purely truncated materialistic terms, “Because, if it does, its genes will last longer”; that’s the extent of your method, which is purely descriptive. But notice what you’ve done here; notice the angle you pretend to be able to take: you assume you can step outside of your own subjectivity and answer either as if you are completely oblivious to the fact that you have inside knowledge, or as if you are completely oblivious to the fact that inside knowledge IS relevant, unavoidable, and inseparable from the question (logically speaking it’s relevant, unavoidable, and inseparable from the question; but one cannot “logically” compel an illiterate man who insists that The Faerie Queen is nothing but black ink on the paper in front of him that it’s anything other than that – will this be an accurate analogy?).
There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know… Notice the following point. Anyone studying man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence [of a self-evident principle]… [H]is observations would only show what we did [not what we ought to do]. –Lewis
Indeed, as David Chalmers noted, “To truly bridge the gap between the physical nature of brain physiology and the mental essence of consciousness, we have to satisfy two different conceptual demands.” For some reason, salanor, you only endeavor to satisfy one conceptual demand; the other, which involves morality, you are at the very least content to subordinate. But you are wrong. To speak from inside conscious experience and say I seek new patterns, purpose, meaning, bla, bla, bla, and etc., “so that my genes will last longer” as if that’s an end in itself is obviously absolute nonsense. Why do I care if my genes last longer? It is true that human nature has a desire to procreate, and thus to pass along genes, but that is not an end in itself – there is only one end in itself, which encompasses why I should care about passing along genes, and that is happiness.
Listen to Aristotle:
Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.
Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else, but honour, pleasure, reason, and every virtue we choose indeed for themselves (for if nothing resulted from them we should still choose each of them), but we choose them also for the sake of happiness, judging that by means of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these, nor, in general, for anything other than itself.
Mortimer Adler puts it succinctly:
[A]ny other good (wealth, health, freedom, knowledge) we can always say that we desire it for the sake of something else… But it is impossible to complete the sentence beginning with the words ‘We want to be happy or want happiness because…’
Happiness, Adler notes, is defined as "that state of human well-being which leaves nothing more to be desired".
Happiness, then, serves as our first principle; it is a “non-reductive primitive”, it is to our inside conscious existence what the “non-reductive primitives”, space and time, are to the external, physical world: in short, it serves as our most general and fundamental context for discussing “natural desire”.
To be continued...
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton
Sober Inebriation:
http://soberinebriationblog.blogspot.com/