Today Reverend Kishkumen ministered to us by way of Dido’s death; the chaos and madness that so often accompanies moral blindness was described in a blistering account of the furies raging against Aeneas and Dido. When the ferocity had finally abated, Reverend Kishkumen turned his back to the congregation, with arms outstretched and facing the stained glass mural depicting Cicero and Seneca, he recited in a cracked but just audible voice with perfect elocution:
For our friends at The Interpreter and the frequent commentators at Sic et Non, a passable translation of that fragmented line might be, “she sought light in heaven and groaned as she found it.”Reverend Kishkumen wrote:quaesivit caelo lucem ingemuitque reperta
The Death of Dido (after Reynolds), by Henry Bone 1804.
It was a poignant sermon, especially since I have just laid eyes upon Daniel Peterson’s latest thinkpiece 'If God Does Not Exist, Is Everything Permitted?'. Here is the abstract:
That “very prominent student of religion and society” is the sociologist Christian Smith and that “relatively new book” is ‘Atheist Overreach: What Atheism Can't Deliver’. When it comes to The Interpreter, book reviews are usually just book reports with minimal and often tangential engagement. Thankfully, Daniel assures us this is not a review:Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Can people be good without believing in God? Obviously, yes. They can. Is atheistic naturalism capable of supplying a foundation for morality? That is a separate question, to which more than a few theists have answered No. However, a relatively new book by a very prominent student of religion and society suggests otherwise. A rational morality can, it argues, be founded upon atheistic naturalism — but it will necessarily be a modest and quite limited one, lacking universal scope and without a belief in human rights as objective “moral facts.”
Now I lack the time to do a full and systematic analysis of Daniel’s latest work in one sitting, but I would like to get the ball rolling and hopefully work my way through all the interesting portions as the week progresses. So let us begin at the first paragraph (bolding mine):Daniel C. Peterson wrote:I won’t be offering a book review of Atheist Overreach here, nor will I be drawing on the entirety of the book. I’m hoping that at least some of you will take a look at it yourselves, because I think that it has much to offer. But I do want to examine what it has to say about whether, “if God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.”
That is an interesting dichotomy: theism or moral nihilism. I suppose this is intended to put atheists in some kind of dilemma, but I have a hard time not seeing this as a false dichotomy. Given the abundance of accounts for a secular moral realism in the relevant professional literature, it would be quite the feat for someone to demonstrate how all of that somehow collapses back into only choosing theism or moral nihilism.Daniel C. Peterson wrote:The striking statement that, “if God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted,” is often attributed to the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) and, more specifically, to perhaps his greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, which was first published in 1880. Theists have used the statement to argue that the alternative to belief in God is moral nihilism.
Given how little Daniel reads in philosophy and his total lack of intellectual discipline, I don’t think such a feat is within his capabilities.
Speaking of Daniel’s aliteracy in regards to philosophy, here is yet another example. When someone makes the claim that the divine grounds a moral system, they are not really telling you much. All it amounts to is saying that there is some kind of relationship between the divine and the moral system wherein the moral system obtains normativity by virtue of the divine. One would really have to flesh out the nature of this relationship to make it tenable.Daniel C. Peterson wrote:Absent a grounding in the divine, so the argument goes, human moral systems are without foundation — and, thus, are likely to crumble in the face of human self-interest, error, and corruption.
Kit Fine has a paper titled ‘A Guide to Ground’ that is usually used as an introduction to the topic, but it was written more for graduate students and active philosophers. Because of the background requirements, I’ll just use one example of a problem Daniel faces with his thesis and do my best to explain its relevance(p.4):
Fine sets up what we call a logical disjunction. The variable “R” represents the proposition “the act was right”, the “v” is the disjunctive operator that can be understood as “either/or”, the symbol “￢” represents negation, like saying “not”. The brackets are a convention to help with grouping variables and symbols.Kit Fine wrote:For consider the fact that a given act was right or not right (R v ￢R). This is grounded, we may suppose, in the fact that it is right (R).
So “(R v ￢R)” can be translated as “It is the case that the act was right or it is not the case that the acts was right”.
When Fine says we may suppose (R v ￢R) is grounded in (R), he is making reference to the axioms of First Order Logic where one can start with (R) and logically derive (R v ￢R). That is to say (R) determinative for (R v ￢R) by way of logic.
But this is the easiest type of ground to speak of.
The “ ' ” symbol after “R” indicates a proposition that is of a different kind. So (R) is a question about a specific action being right and (R') is about what it is that makes an action right or wrong. In Fine’s example, what makes something right or wrong is that the action maximizes happiness.Kit Fine wrote:The fact that it is right, we may suppose, is (normatively) explained by the fact that it maximizes happiness (R').
Let’s abandon the “maximizes happiness” aspect and assume for our purposes that (R') means an action is right if it is scriptural commandment. At first glance, it looks like (R') explains why an act can be deemed right or not right (i.e. (R v ￢R))Kit Fine wrote:So the fact that the given act is right or not right is explained in the generic sense by the fact that it maximizes happiness.
Now we get to the part where the rubber meets the road. That little box “□” is a modal operator that indicates necessity (in this case, metaphysical necessity) and “'⊃” is a logical entailment.Kit Fine wrote:But it is a metaphysical necessity that if the act maximizes happiness then the act is right or not right (□R'⊃(R ∨ ￢R)), since it is a metaphysical necessity that the act is right or not right (□(R ˅ ￢R)).
So “(□R'⊃(R v ￢R))” translates as “Necessarily, if R' then R or ￢R”, but there is a fly in the ointment. (R v ￢R) is a disjunction where “R” and “￢R” are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive; which amounts to saying it *has* to be the case that if it isn’t “R” then it has to be “￢R”.
So it looks like “(□(R ˅ ￢R))” (which translates into “Necessarily, R or not R”) is what actually grounds “(R v ￢R)” and not “(□R'⊃(R ∨ ￢R))”.
So let me restate what Fine is saying here in a context relevant to Daniel’s thesis.Kit Fine wrote:However, the fact that the act maximizes happiness does not metaphysically ground the fact that it is right or not right, contrary to the proposed definition. Nor is it altogether clear how the definition might be modified so as to avoid counter-examples of this sort.
Let us say there is a fellow by the name of Louis M. who steals tithe money so he can buy a 24 pack of Miller Lite. The action of Louis M. is either morally right or morally wrong, and according to Daniel, this is grounded in the divine commandments recorded in scripture. Daniel then turns to the atheist and says, “You can tell me that what Louis M. did was morally wrong, but you don’t have a grounding for what is morally right and morally wrong.”
But the atheist can reply that what is actually grounding the question of “is this action morally right or morally wrong” is simply the logic used to pose the question. The action is either morally right or morally wrong by necessity because those are the only two options available, it *has* to be one or the other.
Oh my! Look at the time. I have to get going, Dr. Scratch is hosting a little soiree in the faculty lounge at the B.H. Robert’s building. In addition to brandy being served, the hors d'oeuvres are these deconstructed kobe beef sliders that will send you straight to the Celestial plane.
