Larry,

When two positions are expressed in language and seem logically opposed to each other we should not fall under the spell of this false logical opposition. Language has an hypnotic effect and the less we use our imagination and the more prone we are to fall under the hypnotic effect of language. The more we create our own story of how thing ought to be, then the more we realize the large amount of other possibility out there. We do not have to accept the limited choices provided to us by a simplistic story. If we take the abortion issue and listen to the simplistic story of the two opposite camp, we should not feel compel to choose one of those. We should feel compel to invent our own story where these two story are part of. Both camps have a part of the truth. It is possible to invent other stories ajusting to a range of diverse realities and witch is more appropriate story about abortion. My position is yes ultimately a woman should have a choice but the state should put in place not only the abortion services but also all the social support services so that she also can realistically choose to keep her child. Life is precious, especially for a mother, so we should help mothers raising their children if they choose to do so. So I prefer my narrative to the official pro-choice or to the official pro-life narrative. It is like that for all political issues. We are compelled to choose between two choices as if only two choices exist out there.

It depends upon what is meant by the term "objective," as well as what kinds of values are being discussed. Consider, for example, the category of instrumental values. It can be demonstrated empirically that an ophthalmoscope is good for examining the retina of a patient, and certainly much better so than a flashlight.

Compare ethics with logic, ontology and epistemology - all primary fields of philosophy, which have been objects of endless discussion. Ask yourself: Does validity (in valid arguments? Is this just linguistic or conceptual convention? (Probably not) Then: Does evidence exist (an epistemological category)? Are ontological claims true or false? Since logic, ontology and epistemology have "objective" status, so does ethicis. Its ascription of properties (right, wrong, good) is not "queer" -contra Mackie (and his dated predicate).

I'm inclined to say no, because there cannot be values without a valuer. So if there weren't any valuers there wouldn't be any values. But that doesn't mean of course that all values are instrumental. They can be intrinsic in the sense that we value things for their own sake, and since we don't decide to value things, but rather find ourselves valuing them, it is for us as if there were objective values, or in other words, objective values exist, but only for us. (And again, for a very different view see the work of Hans Jonas, whom I recommended before, and also Alfred North Whitehead, who, like Jonas, locates value at the basis of existence: for Whitehead being is valuing.)

I agree with you here Michael when you would situate the objectivity of values in us, which I take to mean in human nature (if you will permit the notion of human nature). Here is Aristotle:

Surely, if ‘healthy” and “good” mean one thing for men and another for fishes, whereas “white” and “straight” always mean the same, “wise” must be different. For each particular being ascribes practical wisdom in matters relating to itself to that thing which observes its interests well, and will entrust itself to that thing. That is the reason why people attribute practical wisdom even to some animals – to all those which display a capacity of forethought in matters relating to their own life. (NE, VI, 7, 1141a, 21-28)

The perception communicated by this simple statement seems almost self-evident. True wisdom regarding humans is that wisdom which observes human interests well. Aquinas identifies this understanding as basic to the Natural Law:

For there is in humans, first, an inclination to the good in accordance with the nature which they share in common with all substances, in as much as every substance seeks the preservation of its own being . . . and by reason of this inclination, whatever is a means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles, belongs to the natural law. (ST, Ia,IIae, 94.2)

The well-being of human beings in particular seems the only possible secular grounding of "objective value". In order to be meaningful, normativity must be related to actual human needs. These can only be addressed collectively if there are, in fact, a significant number of characteristics which all humans share, if, in fact, there is a “human nature.” I believe that the work of Stephen Pinker and Donald Brown (Brown especially) reduces our quibbling over the existence or non-existence of human nature down to semantics.

Reluctance to concede the existence of human nature on the part of philosophers is likely motivated in part by the fear that such an acknowledgement will somehow surrender the field to the scientists and thereby result in a widespread biological or genetic determinism. However, merely acknowledging human nature does not in itself entail such determinism.

Apart from such an acknowledgement, some philosophers wall themselves off from the most obvious and readily available source of value and normativity of all: the study of the human.

Mackie is right. Value is always subjective, and moral value is no different. Even something as "objective" as price ("we know the price of everything and the value of nothing"...) has recently been demonstrated to be astonishingly subjective. Why did the price of gold recently plummet? Why was it previously stratospheric? Nobody really knows. The price is what people will pay - subjective by definition!

More generally, moral value MUST be MY value or YOUR value - it has to be someone's value. These things cannot in principle be calculated ab initio! Good grief, if we can't calculate something as simple as the total cross-section for hydrogen fusion at stellar temperatures (which is what keeps the sun shining, and therefore keeps us all alive!) how can we think of being able to calculate, even in principle, the value of the life of 8-year-old Martin Richard (killed in the Boston bombing last Monday)? It is obvious that I can name Martin, where the names of countless other victims are unknown. Was his death therefore a worse atrocity than theirs? There is no calculus for these sorts of questions, we must have a different sort of discourse.

Moral value is a philosophical issue. I can tell you what I value and why, and the foundation of value is always going to be ontological, based on who we are, or on that which makes us who we are.

Phillip Wiebe is definitely wrong. He claims that 'logic, ontology and epistemology have "objective" status', but this is a mistake. He confuses the clearly objective status of arguments framed in these disciplines with the things per se that the arguments are purporting to be about. Even in logic this is true. Logic is based on axioms, and axioms can be freely chosen. The argument is objective, but the choice of argument is subjective! It is we that argue logically, not stones. Nor do logical arguments exist independently of us, in some sort of Platonic aether.

Chris, I want to say that I find Mackie one of the most clear thinking and persuasive philosophers to have written in recent memory. He is very forceful in his argumentation. The only think I want to say with regard to his stance (at this point anyway) is that were there such things as OMVs Mackie would already be prepared to dismiss them. Here's what he says:

“If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.”(p. 38) He goes on to state: correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else.” (p. 38)

Mackie made it clear that if there were OMV's he would need to have his own metaphysics and epistemology altered in order to be able to acknowledge or see them in any way. He compares OMVs to Platonic forms. He states that he has no categories as regards what is "real" for such entities.

I believe I can answer both his arguments from relativity and from queerness (including "intrinsic prescriptivity), but before even going down that road I have two things I want to mention.

Firstly, as Simon Blackburn has powerfully pointed out, Mackie wants to say all that he does about OMVs not existing but then continues moralizing in a manner that looks very much like the moralizing done by those who believe in them. This makes one wonder if we really ought to doubt something that not even Mackie seems able to get away from. Secondly, if there are such things as OMVs and one has one's mind so fixated on certain scientific categories that one cannot admit the possibility of their existence, doesn't that make one blind to any such entities if they do in fact exist?

Bill: the fact that one insists on moralising (as I certainly do) does not entail the belief in OMVs! This is a confusion between reality and objectivity, which are emphatically not correlated. "Love" is really there, for example, but it is always relational - that is, it is never "objective". Moral values are real, but they are not objective.

Roughly speaking, OMVs are in the same category not as unicorns, but as square circles.

Bill: you speak of 'the only possible secular grounding of "objective value".' In my view this is nonsense, both in its own terms and in relation to your argument using it. But you could validly speak of 'the only possible secular grounding of "value".' I want to comment though that the fact of the grounding being secular has no bearing on it being objective! Logically, there is no difference between "believers" and the irreligious; the one believes one set of things and the other another. And all of us are subjects, whatever we believe!

Hi Chris - I have not maintained that moralising necessitates belief in OMV's, you misunderstand me there. Blackburn has a chapter in Honderich's Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J.L. Mackie, wherein he states:

John Mackie described himself as a moral sceptic, and he described his theory of ethics as an error theory. The ordinary user of moral language wants to claim something which, according to Mackie, cannot be claimed without error: he wants to claim 'something that involves a call for action or for the refraining from action, and one that is absolute, not contingent upon any desire or preference or policy or choice, his own or anyone else's'. 1 Again, someone in moral perplexity may want to know whether a course of action is wrong 'in itself', and 'something like this in the everyday objectivist concept' which is erroneous. For, according to Mackie, ordinary judgments and perplexities include an assumption that there are objective values, in a sense in which he denies that there are. This assumption is ingrained enough to count as part of the meaning of ordinary moral terms, but it is false.

Mackie did not draw quite the consequences one might have expected from this position. If a vocabulary embodies an error, then it would be better if it were replaced by one which avoids the error. Slightly more accurately, if a vocabulary embodies an error in some use it would be better if either it, or a replacement vocabulary, were used differently. We could better describe this by saying that our old, infected moral concepts or ways of thought should be replaced by ones which serve our legitimate needs, but avoid the mistake. Yet Mackie does not say what such a way of thought would look like, and how it would differ in order to show its innocence of the old error. On the contrary, in the second part of the book, he is quite happy to go on to express a large number of straightforward moral views, about the good life, about whether it is permissible to commit suicide or abortion, and so on. All these are expressed in the old, supposedly infected vocabulary. Mackie does, of course, notice the problem. He explicitly asks whether his error theory rules out all first-order ethics, and when he returns to the question there is a real threat that ideally there would be no such activity as first- order moralizing. The threat is only averted, supposedly, by introducing the general Humean theme about the social function of morality: 'Morality is not to be discovered but to be made: we have to decide what moral views to adopt, what moral stands to take.' Yet from the standpoint of an error theory it is quite extraordinary that we should have to do any such thing. Why should we have to choose to fall into error?

This is now me (Bill) again - There is more to the quote, but I think you get the idea. As to your claim that it is nonsense for me to speak of a grounding of objective moral value, I am not the one who began that sort of language being used in the discussion. Mackie began it with his distinction between first order and second order moral claims. I haven't the time at present to unpack and compare and contrast the two. As to the grounding being secular having no bearing on its being objective: I couldn't agree with you more. However, presumably religion is out of court when one is having a discussion with Mackie or those sympathetic to his views. In religion there is a "thus sayeth the Lord" or something similar which is seen as the source of grounding for values. Their objectivity comes from the Moral Code of the particular faith (each faith having Creed, Code, and Cult). In the matter of values done in a purely secular fashion the only objective and non-theoretical interface between axiology and ontology seems to be the very beings who are doing the valuing. As both Hume and Foote have powerfully shown, morality MUST be grounded in that which benefits humans if it is not to be merely arbitrary. I hope that helps clarify what I am saying.

Hi Bill. Hmmm, I couldn't quite see what you were saying so I interpreted ... I am still not quite sure I see what you are saying, or, if I do, then I would take a different line. Clearly I will not be persuaded by either Hume or Mackie, however much they have clarified issues!

By the way, you seem to think that "religions" base moralising on the "thus saith the Lord" texts in their sacred books. This has enough truth to be plausible, but actually traduces the depth of Christian arguments at least. I can't speak for other religions.

I would treat this issue from a Christian point of view as follows: God objectively created the universe and everything in it (including both the time and the space dimensions). Insofar as both God and his creation really exist, there also exist OMV. However, this does not get us very far! Logically speaking, the believer and the non-believer are in the same place. One chooses to believe an assertion, the other chooses to disbelieve it; but, as for axioms, assertions are chosen - they are not provable. Insofar as no axioms are provable, the existence of both God and his creation are debatable, and consequently OMV do not exist! This is a statement of the logical state of affairs, not a contribution to questions of morals.

We only make progress by treating the issues. When the prophets cried, "Thus saith the Lord" they were recalling the people (including us!) to a view of the purposes of God. I would say that all purpose was moral. Morals flow from purposes. How do you justify your aims? This has quite a strong relation with Hume's point of view, but is in the context of a better understanding of what logic actually is (Goedel's theorems astonished everybody, and Hume would also have been vastly surprised).

I think the question is wrongly stated. There aren't even objective facts. All facts we know are colored by the worldview we have. The same counts for morals. Having said this, I think morals can be grounded in facts and therefore can be studied empirically (e.g. From the 'is' to the 'ought'). Of course, our morals are very much coloured by our own position: 'It is good for you to help me and not my enemy'. However, this does not mean their aren't universal principles that underly ethics. I agree with Bill that we best study morals by studying humans. In biology it is common sense that human brains are wired to cooperate in order to survive and spread their genes. Even religions are directed in that way (e.g. Deutoronomium 8:1). As our values and norms are necessary to keep cooperation up, they essentially serve our survival and reproduction. Behaviour of all life is structured to enhance survival and reproduction. If there would be some 'objectivity' in morals, it would be that one must act in a way that he and the organisms he depends upon will flourish (that is ultimately will spread their genes). Evolutionary psychology does a good job to disentangle human behaviour in the light of evolutionary benefits.

Hello - Responsing to Chris here:

Chris you have written: "I would treat this issue from a Christian point of view as follows: God objectively created the universe and everything in it (including both the time and the space dimensions). Insofar as both God and his creation really exist, there also exist OMV. However, this does not get us very far! Logically speaking, the believer and the non-believer are in the same place. One chooses to believe an assertion, the other chooses to disbelieve it; but, as for axioms, assertions are chosen - they are not provable. Insofar as no axioms are provable, the existence of both God and his creation are debatable, and consequently OMV do not exist! This is a statement of the logical state of affairs, not a contribution to questions of morals."

There is a difficulty with what you have said here. You speak on the one hand of "insofar God and his creation really exist, there also exist OMVs." Yet you go on to say that the debatable nature of God's existence means that OMVs do not exist. Having called into question the existence of an entity does not entitle us to then assert that something which would find its grounding in that entity is non-existent. Only had you demonstrated the non-existence of God could you then make this assertion. What you can legitimately say is, "the existence of God and his creation are debatable, and consequently the existence of OMVs is debatable."

Responding now to Hendrik: I am puzzled by how you begin, although I appreciate where you ultimately wind up. By defintion facts are "that which is indisputably the case" or "that which is actual". Now there is, indubitably, the sense in which we humans confer the status of "fact" upon an entity or state of affairs, but unless we are to abandon the sciences altogether and assume that everything devolves into the meaning agnosticism of postmodernism and cultural relativism, we cannot assert that our own worldviews all cut us off from one another and from any grasp on the true nature of reality. To do so is effectively the death of science and learning. Do you really wish to say that there aren't any objective facts and then go on to say that "I think morals can be grounded in facts." That seems a self-defeating assertion. If ethics are grounded in amorphous, shifting, culturally different, wordview-dependent "facts" , then of what use are they? What are they grounded in? Mind you - I am not being oppositional. I agree with your ultimate conclusion, I just think your earlier assertion militates against your own intentions. Am I missing the point of what you intended to say?

I think we agree Bill, but I think it is important to define 'objective'. If you define it in the light of science, I think there can be found 'objective' morals as well. In your answer to Chris you are rightly stating that if morals are grounded in religion or ethics or culture it will be hard to find the objectivity for exactly those disciplines (in my view) very much arise from our biological nature within an ever changing environment. Religious and cultural foundations therefore can never be 'objective'. Nevertheless morals also vary - to certain extent - from culture to culture. Your question is interesting because to questions can be derived from it: 'What part of morals can be grounded in 'objective', that is scientific, facts and thus can be called 'objectiv' and what part varies in time and/or between cultures. The former I like to see as the 'nature' part of morals, the latter part I would call the 'nurture' part of morals.

In my answer I refered to Popper: 'The theory dictates what we observe'. One could see humans as static organisms of which genes are the blueprints, one can also see humans as processes of life that are steered by genes. Even in quantummechachanics the method dictates what facts you will observe. This also is the case for morals. Culture or ethical systems will dictate what you consider to be right or wrong. In some cultures homosexuality is wrong, in other cultures homosexuals can marry. Nevertheless, if you are human you will very probably disapprove of the murder of groupmembers. The latter is - from a biological point of view - pretty much objective. If see it wrong, please correct me.

Chris Jeynes says: "Phillip Wiebe is definitely wrong. He claims that 'logic, ontology and epistemology have "objective" status', but this is a mistake." I like this. Someone said of Bertrand Russell: "Russell is wrong, but he is wrong clearly," and to this I aspire. I would say that when we decide to engage.in argument we speak to conditions (events, processes, etc.) in the world. Both linguistic and conceptual activities occur (generally), of course, but more is involved. If I assert 'When it rains then the streets are wet' I speak to some causal feature of the world (I could be wrong, of course), and then when I say 'It is raining' the inference to 'The streets are wet' pertains to the way the world is (where I happen to be). This is "a logical fact," although saying so sounds a bit peculiar. Perhaps this example is not as clear or convincing as one from epistemology. When I assert that the discovery of a constant index of refraction in a new high-index glass confirms Snell’s law I say something about an epistemic relation between a new finding and a natural law. I could be wrong about this epistemic relation (although in this I cannot bring myself to think that really), and it exists independently of my thought. I do not know how this is so, precisely, but I don’t need to be a Platonist to recognize “an epistemic fact.” If logical and epistemic facts exist, why not moral ones? How they exist requires further exploration, but asserting their existence makes sense.

You miss my point Bill. Your (true!) statement, "the existence of God and his creation are debatable, and consequently the existence of OMVs is debatable" is weak - I wish to go much further than this. I intended to briefly point out that morality is as objective as God's existence is. If Law objectively exists, then morality must also objectively exist. And vice versa. But the objective existence of Law depends on the objective existence of the Lawgiver. This is saying something about the nature of the world, not the nature of my opinions!

But further. There are two things: what is, and what we can know. Moreover, knowledge itself is not a simple thing. There are different sorts of knowledge and different sorts of knowing. We all know this very well! Consider the difference between these two statements: "Adam knew his wife" and "Einstein knew that Planck's constant was not a mathematical fiction".

Phillip is edging towards this in his contribution. We can usefully assert the existence of epistemic facts. But we cannot know (logically) that our assertions are correct, and this is a property of the nature of knowledge. See Goedel's theorems, and Michael Polanyi's masterly "Personal Knowledge" (1956 I think) which shows in elegant detail what ithey mean. Nevertheless, I "know" (epistemically) that God exists!

I think the early church were correct in believing that Philo (and Plato before him) were proto-Christians, although they believed Plato too much, just as the mediaevals believed Aristotle too much. And note that Roger Penrose considers himself effectively a Platonist too.

I think that Phillip has made a valuable contribution to this discussion. Unfortunately, as human beings, we are limited epistemically, because we cannot get outside of our own viewpoint in order to verify that what we know about the world outside of our minds corresponds to the way the world really is. This leaves us in the position of never being able to confirm our knowledge about the world with 100% certainty. If we acknowledge this limitation, we can always strive towards an objective knowledge of the way the world is. We recognize that from within our 'viewpoint' of the world there are logical facts; ie a valid argument vs an invalid argument. The validity of modus ponens is undeniable, and independent of cultural or linguistic backgrounds. If this is what we mean by 'objective facts about the world outside of our minds', I think that one could also argue that there are objective moral values. The objectivity of moral values, just like the objectivity of logical truths will always be a result of the relation between our human perspective or viewpoint, and states of affairs in the world outside of our minds. Although practical reasoning might be more 'fuzzy' than say mathematical reasoning due to all of the factors of interpersonal relations that are involved; it does seem that there is an objectively right and wrong way of reasoning about moral values.

One human experience that makes me think that it could be true that there is objectivity to practical reasoning is the fact that many of us: 'feel guilty' for something that we know we 'shouldn't feel guilty about because objectively it wasn't my fault'. This is, I believe, a common human experience in which our reasoning is telling our moral sentiments that they are not being 'objective'. The fact that we recognize that there is such a thing as 'false guilt' could be evidence for some sort of objectivity in practical reasoning.

Esther is mistaken in two ways. Firstly, it is not true that we "cannot get outside of our own viewpoint in order to verify that what we know about the world outside of our minds corresponds to the way the world really is." Empathy is precisely the ability to see from another's viewpoint, and the whole of literature is predicated on this possibility of having our worldview overturned. This is particularly the case in science, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his seminal work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962).

She is also mistaken in giving this as the reason for "never being able to confirm our knowledge about the world with 100% certainty." As I pointed out earlier, indeed we can know nothing except tautologies with 100% certainty, but the reason for this is logical. Even if the real world is expressible by a logically consistent description (as we must believe it is to remain sane), nevertheless there exists no finite logical language in which it can be expressed. That is, in principle it must, ultimately, be unknowable (from a logical point of view). This is a consequence of Gödel's theorems (1931). All analytical knowledge is necessarily partial. This has nothing to do with "objectivity", it is a property of logic - it is the way rationality works..

This discussion of "objectivity" is not in the right terms to be useful, since the underlying preconception is that there can exist absolutely demonstrable moral value independent of philosophical context. This is simply nonsense. It is a category error as I showed in previous posts.

People correctly intuit that the world is unknowable if it is only complete and certain knowledge that is in view. But they often consequently infer that lack of certainty implies lack of knowledge. This is incorrect since knowledge never gives absolute certainty, unless it is knowledge of tautology. This itself is a tautological statement, being a logical consequence of Gödel's theorem.

"Objective moral values" is a logical nonsense, since value is never objective: when will the philosophers catch up with the mathematicians? As I said at the start of this discussion, value is always subjective, necessarily. Value can never be expressed in a vacuum of meaning, as tautologies can be. Value must be personal – it must be subjective! Listen to Gregory of Nyssa (Homily on the Song of Songs, c.380AD) talking specifically about moral values ("what is right and good") :-

"You are no longer to be divided in your judgement about what is right and good because you are all to be united to the supreme good. As the Apostle says, you are to be bound together in bonds of peace in the unity that comes from the Holy Spirit."

Gregory is quoting St.Paul (Letter to the Ephesians 4:3) and continues by quoting Christ Jesus: "Be one, as I and the Father are one" (Gospel of John 17:11 et passim). The point is that Gregory is urging an argument on his hearers, an argument with the premise that there exists a "supreme good". Value can never be "objective" – it must always be premissed on something! Where we do not agree on the premise we may also not agree about the conclusion. This is logically unavoidable: the very idea of OMVs is not coherent!

Yes and No.

Yes, they exist but it would be impossible to demonstrate it. Objective moral values exist such as the imperative, "Thou shalt not kill, steal, lie, etc." No particular culture would concede or promote with the idea that killing (stealing, lying) is moral and/or legal in any form. We abhor and reject any form of irrational, malicious, vicious and malevolent behavior. No society would encourage killing as a way of life or stealing as a rational or ethical behavior. However, we cannot totally agree that all rational beings are behaving rationally. That is why (human) laws are created to regulate and moderate human behavior. It may not be perfect since it is based on the general will of the people.

No, because it is hard to prove logically that such values exist. Different situations would appeal to different solutions and approaches. Thus, we cannot have a universal and objective solution to any specific case. Right intention, right action and prudent judgment is essential in making any value judgment.

There are objective values but they are logically improbable to demonstrate.

It is not a question of whether J.L. Mackie is/was right or wrong, it is a question of whether it makes sense in life if we believe that there are objective values. Does it make human life worth living, if there are those kinds of values? Or does it make life more humanly difficult to live?

Moral values are not objective, but they may be universalized by consensus among a great number of people. Of course, we are inclined to act as if they were objective because we do think they are good, and they are the meaning we do attribute to any fact or any act,

Larry, I think you have transmogrified Alvin/Ricardo's points of view by mixing in your own. Neither of them advocated the "white lie"! I think that the attempt to establish OMV is "elitist" in that were it possible then moral value would be the property of the philosophers. However, it is not possible to establish OMV, and instead we have to affirm the personal responsibility of everyone for their own actions.

Alvin is mistaken in logic to say "There are objective values but they are logically improbable to demonstrate". In my last contribution I have demonstrated that value cannot be proved and therefore cannot ultimately be "objective". But he is logically correct to point to the importance of belief.

And Ricardo is precisely correct to a) deny ultimate objectivity and b) affirm the necessity of validating moral value by personally attributing meaning to them.

Larry, you have not taken into account my contributions. Value is necessarily personal. But it is not thereby entirely relative. I explain this best from my point of view. I believe that God objectively exists. Then value is relative to Him and therefore also objective. But God's existence is unprovable (in the Gödel sense) and therefore value is not objective (in the usual tautological sense).

This interplay between "objective" and "subjective" is a necessary property of all knowledge, which (and here I repeat my reference from previous posts) Michael Polanyi elegantly demonstrated at length in his beautiful book "Personal Knowledge" (1958).

Thus, I consider Alvin's attribution of "objectivity" to morality as entirely valid, from a logical point of view; similarly, Ricardo properly supports the "objectivity" of one's morality by his personal belief, as one must.

We are not talking in this thread (as I understand it) of the "absolutisations" you refer to, albeit these are pervasive (and important!) political questions. Rather we are stepping back to a philosophical enquiry about the limits of certainty.

Larry, Chris has just understood my point. I did not say it is "good" to act as if our values were objective, but that it is our belief in their goodness that makes us see them as if they were objective. It is just the opposite of the absolutization you have seen in my assertion: everyone has its measure of "Good" and "Evil", and judges by its own measure words and actions of other people.

Larry: you ask, "Would you not accede that in the history of philosophy and politics and Western religion, claims for objective value and truths typically also come with the claim of being absolute and eternal?" Of course I would. The reason is that the people that made these claims all believed that God objectively existed and that therefore moral value (and indeed all value) also objectively existed. And note my previous quibbles about "objective"!

You miss my point. I am absolutely not "discussing the issue within [a] philosophical vacuum"! I am pointing to the logical dimension of the question which people (including you) systematically overlook. Is it sensible to talk nonsense? To speak of "begging the question" (of the validity of my premise) overlooks the general limits on logical arguments. In principle, not everything can be proved! Ultimately, knowledge is necessarily subjective! To say that tautologies are "empty" is to misunderstand the difference between a valid (and wrong!) argument and an invalid (and senseless) one.

I think there are objective values, no one agrees with the violation, or to condemn an innocent man, to lie, cheat, steal. Everyone likes to be treated with respect. A good rule of ethics is to do to others what you do not want us.

I think that universal values accepted by cultures, somehow are assumed as objective values (not subjective), when societies recognize as true and good those values and make public to all members of those societies. Sometimes these objective values are embodying in documents like the Universal Human Rights Declaration. They are not empirically demonstrable as the same way that physics can prove a phenomenon, but the general condemnation of acts such as rape, lying, condemning an innocent, etc. are examples of its importance and universality.

If you accept that lying is permitting, how can we read scientific reports with tranquility, or talk among ourselves. The prohibition of lying protects the value of truthfulness. Without it, there would be no trust.

The decision to apply the universal or objective values at the moment of make an ethical decision depends on the way that each person has taken the ethics concepts in his life.

Pablo, what you're talking about is Kant's Categorical Imperative. "Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law". But Kant was not arguing for objective moral values from what I understand. He was just describing a better way to live. I have yet to be convinced of objective moral values, the concept just doesn't make sense to me. Especially the way we tend to manipulate our morals by constructing various justifications for when we break them. For instance killing; it's a hero's deed when you kill the right person at the right time, even if that person is completely innocent. This goes back to what Larry said, "just because a lot of people believe in something hardly means, per se, that the belief is objectively true". If you convinced enough people that something is justified, you can will them to invade countries and kill innocents. Then take telling the truth. We have two whistle blowers in the news right now in America, one of whom is facing prosecution which could lead to the death penalty. Our morals may not be objective, but their consequences often are.

OMV would be consistent within one's community or living space. What is moral or ethical in one part of the world is not always regarded as moral and ethical elsewhere. Morals and values are dependent on society. Objective seems to me to be something that all would be able to quantify and count without any judgement. Objective is the word that I can not wrap my mind around when speaking of morals and values. I have lived many places and always had to adapt to different ways of thinking and living reflective of the society I lived in which was not the U.S. and not a first world nation.

Hello Karla, Mackie, whom I mentioned in my comments about this question brings up the relativity of values from one culture to another in his denial of OMV's, in fact it is one of his two major objections against them. Setting peculiar moral values which emerge from the study of cultural anthropology aside for the moment, is murder wrong in all the places you have lived? Is incest wrong in all of those places? Is cowardice praised in any of those societies? In other words, does there seem to be a basic moral code which transcends cultures? If so, might there be objective moral values which underlie such a code?

Actually I lived one place the murder in some situations by the locals was condoned or at least ignored when it occurred. I was young so the idea of incest was not even in my vocabulary but the crime rate there was worse than N.Y. was a common statement from those of us who were not from the local region. Also, I had a relative that was a "black magic"/dark priest ( I don't know the real term.) He concocted potions and spells and things happened. I wanted to believe in coincidence but it was always happening together. In that society it is okay to inflict harm? That was here in the good ole U.S.A. Is it okay if you can justify it? I hope and pray not!

Bill: Here Caria is right. Objective moral values do not exist. In fact, the idea is an oxymoron. Value cannot ultimately be objective, and morals must always be negotiated.

Carla (sorry about the misspelling of your name above), The fact that you ask "Is it okay if you can justify it?" is largely what drives my quest here with this question. If there are no such things as OMV's then it would seem that all value is subjective, which means all moral standards are relative. Contrary to my friend (truly he is a friend) Chris, who writes immediately above these comments, I am a variety of dinosaur known as a moral realist. Moral realists believe that there are, in fact, objective moral values. If there are not OMV's I believe that we must conclude that ethics ultimately devolves into individual perspectives and tastes.

I personally maintain that the key to identifying what is good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, wise and foolish, is to be found by identifying what works for or against human well-being. One cannot coherently speak in terms of human well-being in a meaningful fashion if there is not some sort of an underlying nature shared by human beings, such that they may be addressed as a collective species or natural kind. Aristotle expresses the understanding that wisdom lies in understanding that what is good for human beings is relative to their being a particular sort of creature:

"Surely, if ‘healthy” and “good” mean one thing for men and another for fishes, whereas “white” and “straight” always mean the same, “wise” must be different. For each particular being ascribes practical wisdom in matters relating to itself to that thing which observes its interests well, and will entrust itself to that thing. That is the reason why people attribute practical wisdom even to some animals – to all those which display a capacity of forethought in matters relating to their own life. (NE, VI, 7, 1141a, 21-28)

The perception communicated by this simple statement seems almost self-evident to me. True wisdom regarding humans is that wisdom which observes human interests well. Thomas Aquinas identifies this understanding as basic to natural law (another out of fashion notion):

"For there is in humans, first, an inclination to the good in accordance with the nature which they share in common with all substances, in as much as every substance seeks the preservation of its own being . . . and by reason of this inclination, whatever is a means of preserving human life, and of warding off its obstacles, belongs to the natural law." (ST, Ia,IIae, 94.2)

The well-being of human beings is the telos of natural law. For Aristotle and Thomas then, in order to be meaningful, normativity must be related to actual human needs. Now these needs can only be addressed collectively if there are, in fact, a significant number of characteristics which all humans share, if, in fact, there is a “human nature.” This idea is also out of vogue with many philosophers, but I stand in the company of Stephen Pinker and Donald Brown in believing in "human universals".

I would personally ground OMV's in what is actually good for human beings. Some may be uncomfortable with the ethical anthropocentrism which this entails and believe that such an approach to values will be especially unacceptable to some peoples of faith. However, at least from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives, there is an acceptable circularity here, inasmuch as human beings are believed to be created in God’s image, and thus the ‘right’ is closely tied to the imago dei (image of God), and thereby to the nature of the deity. This renders the sort of anthropocentrism associated with line of thought non-problematic to adherents of those faiths.

OK, Bill. Granted that we agree that, strictly speaking, value is personal and therefore cannot be strictly objective, I will allow that your invocation of Aristotle and Aquinas is valid, being equivalent to what I called "negotiating" morality. For we both certainly want to assert that "society" exists, and for society to be possible the social members must agree common values that transcend individual points of view.

Strictly speaking then, I would agree that it is sensible to speak of "OMV" only if it is understood that the values are considered to be only "objective" - that is, objective in a manner of speaking. OMV will always be debatable (and debated!) - in this sense it is clear that they are not unequivocal in the way really objective things can be unequivocal. In this terminology, Pythagoras' Theorem (for example) is a thing, objectively unequivocal. No "OMV" can be unequivocal in this way. The last statement, by the way, is also an objective thing, being a corollary of Gödel's Theorem.

These quibbles are really that, only quibbles from the point of view of the purpose of your original Question. However, whereas in past centuries everyone understood that knowledge can only be partial and not complete, now the hubris of man leads many to believe that much is knowable in a way that is actually impossible. For such the idea of "OMV" becomes transmogrified to something else. I was responding to those sorts of considerations.

I believe that I would also like to be classed as a "moral realist" (contrary to your assertion) ... But you said, "Moral realists believe that there are, in fact, objective moral values. If there are not OMV's I believe that we must conclude that ethics ultimately devolves into individual perspectives and tastes." I think that the phrase "objective moral value" is subject to too much misunderstanding and misinterpretation. And if you stated, more precisely, "Moral realists believe that there are, in fact, "objective" moral values" (that is, putting "objective" into quotes), it would become clear that you were only begging the question (what is meant by "OMV"?).

However, your elaboration is very good I think. Does it answer Carla adequately?

Hi Bill! Having slept on it, I wake up thinking that indeed "OMV" is a concept too flawed to be useful. To be sensible one has to gloss "objective" as "actually personal, but with the possibility of wide agreement"! And this stretching of the language does not seem helpful to me.

Would you not have everything you wanted if you dropped the objectionable (or imprecise) "objective" language and instead used "contract" language? It seems to me that the moral realist thinks that a "social contract" is possible. It also seems to me that events in Egypt underline both the unrealism of OMV language and the necessity for an effective social contract able to bind together those of different persuasions.

The added advantage of "social contract" language is that it very easily extends to "covenant" language, language designed to support discourse on both value and on morality.

A basic problem with OMV language is that it fails to persuade. In this it is similar to Anselm's ontological argument ("God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived"). On one sort of reading (not Anselm's!), this is considered a proof of the existence of God. But a comparison with the logical structure of Gödel's theorem underlies Keith Ward's elegant comment on this. Ward says (in "Why there almost certainly is a God", 2008) :-

Anselm's lucid definition ... shows that God is either necessary (he cannot fail to exist) or impossible (the concept is incoherent). But we cannot, simply by thinking, establish which.

We have to be persuaded. And we also have to be persuaded to share moral values. And we ought to try, both to persuade and to be persuaded (which means listening carefully to your opponents). This is a big and important project. In which I fear that the idea of "OMV" is a red herring.

I would like to add a few reflections on the topic of God and objective moral values. It seems to me that the only plausible way of presenting a moral theory that asserts objective moral values would be to include the belief in the existence of some sort of supernatural being who sits in the judgement seat and assesses human behaviour in accordance with a fixed set of moral principles. Without a reference to an "Other" who stands outside of the human point of view, it is impossible to appeal to objective moral values that have an authority that transcends or is universal in an absolute sense (categorical imperatives).

Nevertheless, in my opinion there can be objective moral judgment when we assess human actions with respect to their positive or negative contribution to human flourishing. This sort of objectivity however would not take the form of a categorical imperative as those who "sit in the judgment seat" would all be human persons who lack access to knowledge of principles beyond their own point of view. It would amount to objectivity of a hypothetical sort, although there would still be an objective judgment as opposed to a subjective one as it would appeal to principles that are for the benefit of mankind (we place society or the good of mankind as a whole in the judgement seat and not the subjective individual). This seems to be the only kind of objectivity that we can obtain without making reference to any transcendent being.

I would appreciate any comments on these reflections as I am in the process of researching this question.

Chris,

I think some of the distinctions you have made here are helpful and accurate. Unfortunately the term OMV is something that I believe that J.L. Mackie coined in order to say that he did not believe that there were any universal, transcultural moral values. I may be wrong about Mackie originating the term - it never occurred to me to research the history of the actual phrase. I have, in the past tracked down the source of a phrase and been surprised to discover that it was coined by someone who is entirely uninvolved in the controversy where that term is currently regularly used as special “lingo”. Mackie begins Ethics: Inventing Good and Evil with the bold claim that, “There are no objective values.” In his preface he declares: "I have drawn freely on the ideas both of contemporary writers and such classical moral philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, and Sidgwick. But perhaps the truest teachers of moral philosophy are the outlaws and thieves who, as Locke says, keep faith and rules of justice with one another, but practise these rules of convenience without which they cannot hold together, with no pretence of receiving them as innate laws of nature. I hope that the explanation of this paradox will become clearer in the course of this book."

Mackie is brilliant and very clear. He is one of the most consistent philosophers I have ever read. One is, in a sense, “forced” to play out this debate on his playing field. He created the rules of the discussion. Mackie’s point is that there is not an empirically verifiable source of judgment as regards the condemnation or validation of actions. He is emphasizing the intangible nature of human standards of right and wrong. He asks how one proves or disproves that which seemingly has no identifiable locus. He questions where absolute standards of right and wrong reside. He says:

"If there were something in the fabric of the world that validated certain kinds of concern, then it would be possible to acquire these simply by finding something out, by letting one’s thinking be controlled by how things were." He sees no objectively verifiable moral or ethical “plumbline” against which to measure actual deeds done in this world. He goes on to state: “Of course if there were objective values they would presumably belong to kinds of things or actions or states of affairs, so that the judgments that reported them would be universalizable.” There are no empirical phenomena-based criteria whereby to identify right and wrong; this is one of the reasons why Mackie believes such values have no real existence. Where are they? In what realm does one find such objective standards of right and wrong? Should we really believe that something which has no confirmable existence is real? Those are the questions that Mackie asks, and the challenge which he presents. Though I find your (Chris’) distinctions about terminology of worth, this is how the discussion is framed in moral philosophy. If I want to say that there are identifiable universal moral standards then I must call them OMV's because that is how this conversation is conducted at present. I suppose I could do a meta-ethical critique of the issue such as Quine was fond of doing, but I don’t personally believe that such critiques are as valuable as some hold them to be. That particular sort of meta-ethics is, to me, a waste of time. It is the business of talking about the language of ethics rather than talking about ethics proper.

From what I know of Mackie I do not believe that his usage of the term was intended to be a “red herring”. He was probably intending to show how outlandish the notion of unchanging moral values was to him. He elsewhere compares the idea to Platonic forms. But Mackie is not evasive. A “red herring” is meant to throw us off the scent of the true issue at hand, and Mackie is more than willing to engage any opponent about this matter. What he is doing is “painting” what he views as the absurdity of such a notion (that of OMV’s) in terms that starkly communicate his doubt and incredulity. Either I can debate him or I can ignore him, but inasmuch as he is deceased I cannot change my language and see how he responds.

Now here is my thought process in this regard: We all know of odd and aberrant cultural practices which the study of anthropology has made known to the Western world. Regardless of those revelations, there do not seem to be wholly “new” moral values to be found anywhere. Imagine a society dedicated to selfishness, cowardice, dishonesty, and injustice as moral goods. It is literally unimaginable. Even if I am one of Mackie’s “outlaws or thieves” I cannot bring myself to truly feel a moral obligation to carry out the activities of my chosen career. I do those things, all the while with my conscience accusing me that what I am doing is wrong. I feel a social pressure to abide by the rules of my particular band of thieves or pirates or what have you, and I carry out actions which humanity views as abhorrent, but I cannot do so with anything quite like true moral obligation. Social pressure motivates me even as conscience condemns me. Even if I constantly work to suppress and kill it, something inside me censures what I am doing. I simply cannot create a new or different morality. There is something unyielding about the nature of what Mackie has labeled “objective moral values” which seems to be inescapable.

In Paradise Lost Milton puts these words on Satan’s lips: “So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good” (IV.108-109). Now Satan or anyone else may declare “evil be thou my good”, but by saying such a thing a person is not concerned with being virtuous. Rather, they are repudiating the shared standards of virtue and they are, in a very real sense, attempting to create their own morality. They are standing as their own God and declaring that their own will shall now determine what good is. The difficulty with this is that even as they do such a thing they know that they are denying and destroying (by their actions) the common standards of virtue and decency which most all people seem to, in large measure, hold in common. People that do such things may try to justify their actions after the fact, but, if words are to mean anything at all, they simply cannot be motivated by a hunger or desire for “virtue” as they do these things.

Interestingly, in a different work (The Miracle of Theism), where Mackie is not critiquing the notion of OMV’s he is very frank about his own experience of conscience and his sense of value:

“If we take conscience at its face value and accept as really valid what it asserts, we must say that there is a rational prescriptivity about certain kinds of action in their own right: that they are of this or that kind is in itself a reason for doing them or for refraining from them. There is a to-be-doneness or a not-to-be-doneness involved in that kind of action in itself. If so, there is no need to look beyond this to any supernatural person who commands or forbids such action. Equally the regret, guilt, shame, and fear associated with the consciousness of having done wrong, although normally such feelings only arise in relations with persons, are in this case natural and appropriate: what conscience, taken at its face value, tells us is that this how one should feel about a wrong action simply in itself.”

This is a fascinating admission from a man who elsewhere wants to say that we have “invented good and evil”. For my part, given that the language of OMV’s is what is used in order to have Mackie’s discussion in my field, I am willing to work with such phraseology. I maintain that the locus of such entities is entirely unidentifiable, but that it must have something to do with another debated notion, that of human nature.

Esther,

What you are speaking of is what my doctoral thesis was all about. I have left both categorical and hypothetical imperatives out of my argumentation, and have based my case on an axiom. Here is the first paragraph of my thesis:

"If the well-being of human life is not a worthy motive for those being instructed in virtue, then nothing is. Perceiving human life as valuable and working for its well-being seems the most basic of ethical motivations. What is proposed here toward that end is an axiom that all but a very few should find acceptable. It is as follows: “Human life is a great good; because human life is a great good, all humans should work for the well-being of themselves and others.” Obviously, this axiom needs practical clarification; however, it is the beginning point of the ethics herein proposed. Those who embrace it have, when informed by the understandings of science and other disciplines regarding what is necessary for the thriving of human life, a minimal basis upon which to reason ethically across cultures and faiths. From this shared standpoint, basic ethical principles with universal appeal can be identified. Acknowledging the goodness of human life should be philosophically acceptable across the broad spectrum of human beliefs, philosophies and worldviews. Philosophers and religious leaders have spoken with surprising unanimity across time and space regarding the uniquely valuable nature of human life (Stackhouse and Obenchain, 2002, p. 34). Holding this position are philosophers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics (e.g. Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus), Augustine, Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, Locke, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant and Hegel. With the possible exceptions of Nihilism, certain darker forms of Existentialism, and some extreme animal rights groups, which taken all together are a statistically negligible section of the human population, most people at all times and in all places have held life to be a good, and human life to be a great good."

Hume, Moore, and Mackie were the obstacles I had to cross before I could lay out my own methodology. I would be interested in talking with you about a flourishing, thriving, eudaimonia, based ethic which does not depend on the religious to give it weight or gravitas.

Hello Larry,

Yes to Nietzsche's denial of a plumbline, but no to Boas'. Some of his students (e.g. Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, and Alfred Kroeber) definitely deny the "plumbline" but I am not persuaded that Boas himself did so. Stephen Lukes makes quite a strong case that he did not in his book Moral Relativism. I believe that Michelle Moody-Adams has also argued persuasively that this is not true of Boas in her Fieldwork in Familiar Places.

Kant and Sartre are in very different places as regards their views of this issue. I am not sure what you mean about this. Kant's views on ethics are very clear. Today the very notion of deontology is, in a sense, the domain of Kant (though there are numerous other deontologists). Whereas Sartre's ethics is constantly mutating and changing, usually doing so in a state of dialectical tension with the work of Hegel and Husserl. Near the end of his life his ethics and his politics seem to coalesce. I think it is hard to pin down the ethics of Sartre because they were always in flux and always being worked out in contrast to the ethical thought of others.

I wasn't aware of any conflation of religious writers with secular humanistic ones in anything I had written, but I don't know if you are directing that comment at me. I believe there are many religious humanists, so again, the intent of your terminology is not quite clear to me. I presume your mention of "lifting a finger regarding an impending train wreck" has something to do with Foot's Trolley Problem, but again, I am uncertain of why you raise it here. The shark question and that of the giving of alms seem to both be very general with no particular conclusive point to draw them together. I am sorry, but I do not understand what you are pointing out here.

Bill,

I read the first paragraph of your thesis. Our greatest philosophers , our greatest saints, and founders of religious traditions share numerous ethical beleifs. I think that taking a number of them as axioms may be interesting. It could allow to proove a number of ethic theorems. The use of logic could help clean-up the axiomatic system so as to have non redundant axioms, etc, etc..

Although our philosophers, our saint and prophets mostly agree with each other our polititians do not when they perceive their interests as conflicting. The value of a human life is completely disregard in situation of conflicts. The killing of innocent civilians is called ''collateral damage''. The killing of ennemy soldiers is called ''the ennemy was destroyed', ''the ennemy was anihilated'. Human being have great difficulty killing other human being; it is why it is important in the training of the soldier to transform the ennemies into objects. Ehe ennemy has to be dehumanized. When spain wanted to use the south-american native as slave into their mining operation, they could not do so as christian; so they initiated a theological debate sanction by the pope of the time that concluded that the south-american natives were not humans; so it became alright to enslave them into the mining operation. What is my point? I think it is that these moral considerations have to be translated into behaviors towards all humans irrespective of the nationalities and all the laws of nations and practices of nations should be scrutinized and criticized by the UN for them to be globally ethical. Local ethic, compartamental ethic is not acceptable anymore.

I never read a single book on ethic, so forgive my naive approach.

Regards,

Hello Larry,

I was unaware of the quote you give immediately above, so I went and read the entire piece that it comes from. Sartre uses Kant as a point of contrast with himself as far as the "existence precedes essence" idea in that lecture (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946), essentially stating that Kant is the most extreme example of someone who would insist on a universal human nature:

"In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience. Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality."

The phrase you have selected from this lecture sounds somewhat parallel to the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative when taken out of context, but being familiar with existentialism and existential angst, when I read it in its context it seems to me that the anguish he describes is not prescriptively employed as a goad towards genuine virtue. Rather, in a rather theoretical and somewhat esoteric sense it describes the existential anguish or angst that one feels about one's choosing and one's working out of one's essence. As well, there is always the somewhat optimistic Marxist perspective undergirding all of his perceptions which one must take into consideration. I don't think that perspective warrants the confidence Sartre has in it.

As one reads the words of Existentialism is a Humanism, one is stricken by the fact that in Sartre's perception, man is the ultimate judge of what is ethical, and must sit in judgment on himself and others regarding the ethicality or lack thereof of in human actions. He sounds as though he assumes, for himself and other existential thinkers, the "good will" that Kant says one needs in order to be truly ethical. I will grant that Sartre means well here, but I think this ungrounded optimism about this human self-determination is different from Kant's very principled and precise thought process. I don't believe that he is doing quite the same thing Kant is doing with the Categorical Imperative. A bit further on in the lecture he says of the existentialist thinker, with (I think) a touch of existential despair, "He thinks that every man, without any support or help whatever, is condemned at every instant to invent man." There is a circularity here that is more difficult for me to find helpful than what one finds in the Categorical Imperative. Out of what and by what standards is the existentialist inventing man? I want to say that Sartre has an unwarranted hopefulness about the existentialist ability to "invent man" which fails to see the sources and foundations of its own conception of what makes for a good or ethical man. He lacks a grounding or a foundation in this enterprise.

Be that as it may, you have acted as a catalyst on me with your comments. I will explore Sartre a bit more than I have previously as regards ethics. I have ordered Paul Crittenden's Sartre in Search of an Ethics.

As regards "conflating" religious and humanistic writers, although I do not believe I have done so, my goal is a "coalition ethic" (that is what it was labeled by the University of Birmingham philosophy department early on) where religious and nonreligious folk would work together for common cause. My thesis provides a common "fulcrum" as you put it: those things which make for human thriving.

Louis,

I think you are "spot on" with your comments about the human need to depersonalize and objectify other human beings in order to feel comfortable killing them. The Hutus had to first personify their Tutsi neighbors as "cockroaches" before they could hack them to death with machetes, and leave their children with amputated arms and legs. This propensity to deny the value of some other group of human beings enables the large scale genocides which we have seen throughout the 20th Century. I find nothing naïve about what you have written. It seems clear and reasonable. If I can turn my fellow human being into an "it" rather than a "him" or a "her" (in Martin Buber's terms a "thou"), then I can treat that being as unimportant. There is no sense of sanctity to their life from such a perspective.

Well, Bill, OK: you feel compelled to use Mackie's categories. Hmmm. Here is Iris Murdoch, in her "The Idea of Perfection" (Yale Review, 1964; reprinted in "The Sovereignty of Good" RKP 1970, reprinted 2001):

"There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts ... The position in question, in current moral philosophy, is one which seems to me unsatisfactory in two related ways, in that it ignores certain facts and at the same time imposes a single theory which admits of no communication with or escape into rival theories. If it is true that philosophy has almost always done this, it is also true that philosophers have never put up with it for very long."

Murdoch is difficult and subtle, but there is no doubt that she wants to approve of what you have called "OMV"s (and little doubt that she would raise protests similar to mine to your terminology). The moral I draw is that it is your duty to try to wrest the terms of the debate away from Mackie (or, to speak more objectively, of his descendants).

Another incisive commentator, sadly no less subtle, is Margaret Midgley. I am thinking of her beautiful book "Wickedness" (RKP, 1984, reprinted 2001). Again, this is all about what you have called "OMV"s - or more precisely, the obverse side of "OMV"s, namely, the reality of sin (she says, "Emotionally, we are capable of ... vices because we are capable of states opposite to them, namely the virtues"). Of course, she is well aware of what she calls the "restrictive" (theological) definition of sin as "an offence against God", but she chooses to take a "sensible" (non-theological) view (observing for example that theologians tend to "give the phrase 'original sin' a quite limited sensible use").

You say, "There are no empirical phenomena-based criteria whereby to identify right and wrong; this is one of the reasons why Mackie believes such values have no real existence." Then you quote Mackie on consciencious actions, "There is a to-be-doneness or a not-to-be-doneness involved in that kind of action in itself." This reminds me of what Michael Frayn has called "the thingyness of things" (in "The Human Touch", 2006). You are right. There are indeed "no empirical phenomena-based [ie. "objective"] criteria whereby to identify right and wrong". This is because knowing is a human activity, as Frayn makes clear, and as other commentators continue to emphasise (I must again cite Michael Polanyi's indispensible and unsurpassed "Personal Knowledge", 1958, here). Nevertheless, our knowledge of right and wrong does seem to be a very clear and observable phaenomenon in its own right. Mackie's language (of "OMV"s) is deliberately provocative!

You then say, "There is something unyielding about the nature of what Mackie has labeled “objective moral values” which seems to be inescapable. ... I am willing to work with such phraseology [OMVs]. [But] I maintain that the locus of such entities is entirely unidentifiable ..." But an "OMV" is not an entity! It cannot exist, being an incoherent idea! There IS indeed a real entity you have in mind, but it should NOT be labelled "OMV"!

Interestingly, you say to Esther, "I would be interested in talking with you about a flourishing, thriving, eudaimonia-based ethic which does not depend on the religious to give it weight or gravitas." I think this is a category mistake. Why exclude the "religious"? It is very noticeable that neither Murdoch nor Midgley do this, in fact they are careful to explicitly avoid doing it! I think you have the right idea for your programme - to search for an "eudaimonia-based ethic", but, as both Murdoch and Midgley attempt to do, you have to reclaim language that the positivists (and the earlier Wittgenstein) would have called "religious". And you should explicitly strive to avoid Mackie's trap!

Excellent Chris - I love Murdoch! I will take your counsel here into consideration. I just don't want to "blur" the discussion with meta-ethical speculation. You make me chuckle here with your adamancy about it not being an entity (I mean no disrespect by so saying). This is the physicist in you coming out. You will have nothing to do with unnecessary imprecision, whereas I have previously resigned myself to "play" by Mackie's rules. You are having none of it, and perhaps I need to consider taking your path through this problem rather than the one I have chosen.

I am not, as you are aware, opposed to the religious dimension of this discussion at all. My intent, however, is to arrive at a basis of doing ethics which appeals to both the religious and the non-religious. Thus, in writing to Esther I am saying that I am in pursuit of an ethic which does not DEPEND on such categories. I am not excluding such categories, rather, I am not wanting to base my case on them. To use Larry's terminology from above, I don't believe a faith-based approach provides us with a "fulcrum" with an appeal across a wide spectrum of the citizenry.

BTW - I appreciate Mary Midgley and use a piece from her Beast and Man in my ethics classes. I also found her critique of Dawkins quite interesting. It was of particular significance to me that rather than answer her criticisms, he, for the most part, acted the offended party. Since that time he certainly has shown no hesitance to use far more inflammatory language about those with whom he disagrees than Midgley ever used with him. Her Can't We Make Moral Judgments makes a good case for something not unlike your own thoughts here.

Thanks Bill. I didn't know Dawkins reacted like that to Midgley (I liked that book of hers too). Shame. Some people are incorrigible.

Language again: I don't think anyone can avoid "religious" language when they are doing ethics. People say they are "non-religious" but of course they only mean that they are "none of the above" - everyone has what can only properly be described as "religious" motivation. This is what I mean by "reclaiming" the language. Neither Murdoch nor Midgley are "religious" (I think they class themselves as atheists), but they use language carefully. If you develop their precise usage I think you will be on a more fruitful track than the OMV one.

Hi Chris, Murdoch is a Platonist whereas I am an Aristotelian. We therefore part company in a number of significant places. I think her best work in philosophy was the Sovereignty of the Good.I am not really a fan of her Metaphysics of Morals. Her fiction is superb - very thought-provoking, even though her plots usually seem a bit contrived and unreal. My first philosophy professor, the late Ronald Nash of Case Western and also of Reformed Theological Seminary was a Platonist as well. He always cautioned me against the errors of Aristotle and he was only half joking. I know the errors which he intended, and he was correct, they are indeed errors, but the Platonic universe is too indefinite and somewhat mystical for my taste. I simply can't "live" there.

I very much appreciate Midgley. She is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. As you know, I have repeatedly made mention of the concept of human nature, which seems to have been abandoned by most philosophers today. Midgley was someone who was regularly saying that that was a mistake. In psychology I find (oddly) Steven Pinker to be an ally in this regard, and in anthropology it is Donald Brown who is calling for a recognition of human nature as a valid concept. I know of no philosopher in recent years who has so championed the idea as Midgley.

These two ladies are indeed good writers, but I don't think either of them has really entered the fray of the battle which Mackie began with his Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. They have addressed the subject, but not Mackie's arguments. My case for a coalition ethic is not in any way dependent upon Mackie or his terms, rather, Mackie was a hurdle I had to "leap over" before I was allowed to write my actually thesis. I do not use OMV's in making my case, I merely call the notion that they are a fiction into question before I set forth my claims regarding a human flourishing-based ethic.

Hi Larry. I didn't say (or think) that everyone had a religious motivation (as you acknowledge). I said, in the special language of this thread, that everyone had a "religious" motivation, that is, putting the word "religious" in quotes. You also acknowledge that the proper language for describing motivations has an irreducibly "religious" flavour to it when you say "I think that it is indeed difficult to come up with some sort of unquestionable bedrock of moral certitude without appealing to religion", citing Weber.

My position in this thread is to deny the existence of OMVs on the grounds that one cannot talk completely objectively about values. More properly, I am denying that the idea of OMV is coherent. I class all serious talk of ultimate motivations as "religious". If you try to give a serious answer to my question, "why should I do good?" you cannot help but use language that sounds "religious". (Ironically, religious people quite often appear to be unable to answer this sort of question seriously!) Whether or not one classes oneself as atheist is beside the point in this discussion.

You ask about the transcendental. Sorry, but with my background I can't help thinking of the transcendental numbers (pi and e and so forth). Wonderful numbers that lie behind what Roger Penrose calls the "magic" (yes, he uses that word, entirely seriously) of analysis (by which he means the calculus in the complex plane). Using the word with its common connotations, it seems to me that Gödel's Theorem guarantees that everything real is transcendental, that is, it cannot be entirely grasped - the thingyness of things evades complete definition. I do not refer to a belief in God when I speak of the "religious" or the transcendental. That is a completely different discussion.

Glad that you reaffirm that you do not depend on Mackie's terminology, Bill. But I would also be chary of calling myself an "Aristotelian". I recall that Aquinas's "Summa" can be presented as a (brilliant) Christian attempt to rehabilitate Aristotle, but that nevertheless, the Philosopher cast his long shadow down into our times through Trent and Vatican I - and even Vatican II did not exorcise him completely. Aristotle deserved to be influential, but his is still only one of many influences.

I have thought some more, and thanks, Bill, for being so stimulating! First a delightful quote from Murdoch ("The Sovereignty of Good", 1970) which I am re-reading under your influence. She speaks of a position [of Stuart Hampshire, Thought & Action, 1959] that represents :-

... a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnised by Freud ... [but she continues:] I find the image of man which I have sketched above both alien and implausible. That is, more precisely, I have simple empirical objections (I do not think people are necessarily or essentially "like that"), I have philosophical objections (I do not find the arguments convincing), and I have moral objections (I do not think people OUGHT to picture themselves this way).

So Bill, you say you are an Aristotelian and Larry objects to being called "religious" (even if only in quotes!). Bill's teacher was a Platonist (and so is Roger Penrose). But if we can speak approvingly of Socrates (mediated, let it be noted, by Plato), why can we not equally speak approvingly of Jesus of Nazareth (mediated by Luke)? If one is philosophical, why is not the other equally? If one is religious, so surely is the other? The difference of course is that Socrates was sui generis, but Jesus cannot be understood without appreciating his explicitly literary Hebrew context reaching back a thousand years and more. Of course Socrates also has his own historical context, but he was explicitly rethinking everything. His atheism was of a different order from that of first century Christians. But from a practical point of view that is only a quibble since both died for it. What I am saying is that it is harder philosophical work to understand Jesus (you have to read more!); nevertheless, the work is still philosophical. Why put it in a class of its own ("religious") and then ignore it? If you can say you are an Aristotelian, and Penrose can say he is a Platonist, why can I not equally say that I am a Christian? What makes you philosophers and me merely religious (or even "religious")?

By the way, Larry, you completely misread me. You claim that "the main intent of your [that is, my] comment that all motivation is religious (re OMV) is that you presume ahead of time that there is no way to establish the existence of OMV without resorting to religion, since, for example, cultures are relative and only God could make eternal and non-relative moral codes...and I tend to agree with you here." I do not claim that all motivation is religious as I tried to explain in my last post. I claim that all motivation is "religious", that is, is can only properly be described in language usually classed as religious. I emphatically do not claim that such motivations are supported by OMVs, nor that OMVs are established by classical religious views! How can I, since I class OMVs as incoherent ideas, and therefore, strictly speaking, as nonentities? They do not exist! I vigorously assert that moral values do really exist and should be observed by everyone: in that they ought to be universally acknowledged they could be thought to be "objective", but I think the language of objectivity is treacherously misleading and strictly incoherent (since all morality is necessarily personal). See my previous posts - I am repeating myself (sorry!).

Beautiful! I have direct support for my last post from no less than Iris Murdoch herself (op. cit.)! She says :-

In suggesting that the central concept of morality is the "individual" thought of as knowable by love, thought of in the light of the command, "be ye therefore perfect", I am not, in spite of the philosophical backing which I might here resort to, suggesting anything in the least esoteric.

And note well that she is quoting Jesus, both explicitly as reported by Matthew (5:48) and implicitly as reported by John ("love one another", 13:34f; 15:12ff). This is entirely deliberate, despite the fact that she would not class herself as Christian.

Something is subjective if it cannot exist without a subject holding it. Moral values seems to fall in this category of subjective things. Some of them can be shared by a communitiy and those are called inter-subjective in that community.

Some moral values might be natural to all human being and stemming directly from our nature. Such value such the importance of love of each other may be reinforced by education but might be innate. Such a value woud thus be quasi-objective to human being.

What is the nature of such value. My answer is the biological evolution of a biological extended self which extend the homeostatic system of the animal to a community. Human being having the most encompassing and culturally programmable extended self. The signal of the extended self surch love of each other are bio-cultural determinated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOHxsZBD3Us

A lecture on the origins of human cooperation and morality. I haven't read your entire discussion but I just thought I'd throw this out there in case any were interested.

Larry, you say, amazingly :-

It is, of course, possible to philosophically discuss the teachings of Jesus, though it is difficult to know just what can be attributed to him (e.g., Sermon on the Mount contains phrases/ideas previously in circulation) and because others (like Elvis) impersonated him, not to mention that much/most of what is in the Bible was largely written by Church Fathers intent on interpolating their own doctrines.

These are a collection of myths that are, excuse me for being rude but there is no polite way of putting this, laughably unfounded. Do you believe the earth is flat too? This is the wrong place for a digression on the integrity of the Hebrew and Greek texts that comprise the Christian Bible, suffice it here to say that what Jesus said is rather better established than what Socrates said.

And by the way, I believe what the Bible says because I am persuaded that it is reliable, I am not persuaded it is reliable because I believe it is inspired!

Louis, your categories of subjective, inter-subjective and quasi-objective are very helpful. You are also right to suggest that moral values are heavily bio-culturally influenced. But I think you are wrong to say that they are bio-culturally "determined". "It is this" is one thing that may well be (and probably is) very true; "this is all it is" is however manifestly false.

Larry,

One thousand years from now, will the people interpret Martin Luther Kind Washington'speech a littlerary construction of multiple authors? I do not think so because when you can feel King's heart and personallity in this speech. I do not think that litterary construction by multiple authors can be so effective. Jesus' Sermount of the Mount is the essential of Jesus's personallity and heart. I do not need historians digging in libraries to inform me of this; I can feel it. Don't you?

Chris,

I do not imply any bio-cultural determinist. Biological evolution has gradually move away from determinist when behavior learning evolved. It moved away from biological determinist because most that can be learned cannot be learned a priori and genetically stabilized. So the highest animals have more personallity than the lower animals because they learn from their life history which are all different. Your culture is partly determined by the culture you were borned, the location and time you were borned, the family you where borned, the educational system you experienced, etc , etc. You were not a passive learner and a lot of your cultural learning is based on your personal choices and preferences.

Larry, What I have yet to hear on here in anyone's response is an explanation of why there are certain behaviors that are universally proscribed and there are as well certain behaviors that are universally approved of. As I said a few days ago, "Try to imagine a society dedicated to selfishness, cowardice, dishonesty, and injustice as moral goods. It is literally unimaginable." We can quibble over tribal norms, even though Boas, Cook, and others have said that much of what passes for "different moral values" is really just man's inhumanity to man, but at the end of the day there are certain things which most all human beings, everywhere and always, have believed to be bedrock right and wrong. Much earlier in this discussion I cited the atheist Kai Nielsen when he says, "It is more reasonable to believe such elemental things [as wife-beating and child abuse] to be evil than to believe any skeptical theory that tells us we cannot know or reasonably believe any of these things to be evil…I firmly believe that this is bedrock and right and that anyone who does not believe it cannot have probed deeply enough into the grounds of his moral beliefs. " (from his Ethics Without God) I do not think that you have explained this bedrock basic understanding of which Nielsen speaks.

What is it that makes bad bad and good good? Ultimately, why do human rights matter? What exactly is guilt and why do we alone, of all the animals on the earth, seem to experience it (I will concede that animals can feel shame, but not guilt), Why is rape, lying, murder, adultery, slavery, having sex with children, theft, and betrayal wrong? Why is compassion, racial equality, generosity, heroism, and truthfulness good? On what basis do our various city, state, and federal legislatures and courts usually identify what is basically legal and illegal in human relationships and in society? What grounds their laws and keeps them from being arbitrary?There seems to be an enduring, rather "solid" corpus of basic right and wrong which all humans understand and embrace. I believe this basic understanding is tied to human nature and what makes for its thriving or flourishing. How do you account for it and what do you believe grounds it?

Larry, The notion I have in mind as I ask these things is one which the framers of the Constitution held but which has become unpopular in the latter quarter of the 19th Century and has remained so until present except when dire need (such as dealing with the Nazi war criminals) has brought it to the forefront once again. It is an understanding that the framers of the Constitution, one and all (as far as we know), held to. It is what prompted the language that they used when they spoke of holding certain truths to be self-evident. As well, it is put forth by the famous legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart as the bare minimum of moral thought which must underwrite our positive law elsewise it will simply be arbitrary. Robert Jackson, chief council for the United States at Nuremburg spoke of it this way: "...the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization and which long have found embodiment in the codes of all nations." Too, the very fact that Robert Bork had given it passing credence in the past was considered the basis on which he was so forcefully denied a seat on the Supreme Court.

Philip Devine has recently (2000) said this regarding the notion of which I am speaking: "The natural law tradition, though frequently debunked, reappears whenever the dangers of moral chaos become evident to all observers.” Classical natural law does not dictate detailed norms or get involved with casuistry (by which I mean specific case law - not the bastardized American meaning of this otherwise good and useful word), due to the fact that it deals with general principles of right and wrong and of justice and injustice. Although it connects human needs/ human nature to prescriptivity in a teleological fashion, natural law is not a form of teleological or consequentialist ethics. As well, it is not helpful to think of it in terms of deontology. Consequentialism is focused on outcomes, while deontology is focused on the reasoning moral agent. Natural law is primarily focused upon what makes for human flourishing. It is especially concerned with “the good” and “goods,” rather than with the matters with which contemporary moral philosophy is so preoccupied, such as duties, rights, and values. Natural law is about moral first principles, which Budziszewski says are those “moral principles which we can’t not know.”

Ideally the principles of natural law provided a “plumbline” by which to measure the true good of the state and of its constituents and, thus, formed the shape of its legislation and positive law. If, by contrast, law is merely rulings of courts, judges, and government officials, then it is arbitrary. Presumably good government makes rulings that are in keeping with our best interests, but if it has no demonstrable connection to the “isness” of human nature and well-being, then it feels arbitrary and merely prescriptive. It is the same with moral prescriptions: if they are not shown to be based upon what is good for us, rather than the preferences or opinions of others, then it is easy to dismiss them as a matter of indoctrination or mere enculturation. Grounding law in this manner gives real and compelling reason for critical thinking regarding certain behaviors as well as a providing a logical basis for motivation.

This idea is as old as Sophocles' Antigone, and probably older than that. It has had both secular and religious embodiments across time. It seems to have become passé again and again, but it always resurfaces when ethical times are hard and confusing. It is making a comeback today because we once again need to be able to ground both law and ethics in a time when things which were previously thought to be basic and bedrock are shifting and shaking.

I am painfully aware of the shades of grey of which you speak and of all the disagreement over these issues which you raise. I teach ethics and the latter half of the course is all focused on ethical dilemmas. I see the cacophony of disagreement amongst my students about the ethical issues you have mentioned each semester. Be that as it may, I have no hope for ethics or law remaining coherent and compelling on into the future apart from this ancient notion.

Larry, One need not go forward in time to Weber to account for the trajectory of Jefferson's thought, although I do appreciate the analogy you have made with Einstein's usage of "God" and would, in the main, concur with your point there. Jefferson's terminology is simply Cartesian (rationalist) thought which tries to arrive at self-evident (per se nota) truth. Although Deism has a different deity than Christianity, as you point out, and although that deity is not dynamically connected to his creation (having "wound it up" like a clock and then faded into the background), nonetheless Jefferson's basic understandings are still ones which more closely parallel what I am speaking of than any relativistic scheme.

I am not aware of having said anything about an implosion. I believe I said that this concept always comes to the fore when we deal with moral chaos. When the Nazi war criminals claimed that they were being tried ex post facto under laws that were not the laws of the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich, our Chief Counsel, Robert Jackson responded by invoking Natural Law. Here are his words:

"It is common to think of our own time as standing at the apex of civilization, from which the deficiencies of preceding ages may patronizingly be viewed in the light of what is assumed to be "progress." The reality is that in the long perspective of history the present century will not hold an admirable position, unless its second half is to redeem its first. These two-score years in the twentieth century will be recorded in the book of years as one of the most bloody in all annals. Two World Wars have left a legacy of dead which number more than all the armies engaged in any way that made ancient or medieval history. No half-century ever witnessed slaughter on such a scale, such cruelties and inhumanities, such wholesale deportations of peoples into slavery, such annihilations of minorities. The terror of Torquemada pales before the Nazi Inquisition. These deeds are the overshadowing historical facts by which generations to come will remember this decade. If we cannot eliminate the causes and prevent the repetition of these barbaric events, it is not an irresponsible prophecy to say that this twentieth century may yet succeed in bringing the doom of civilization.

Goaded by these facts, we were moved to redress the blight on the record of our era. The defendants complain that our pace is too fast. In drawing the Charter of this Tribunal, we thought we were recording an accomplished advance in international law. But they say we have outrun our times, that we have anticipated an advance that should be, but has not yet been made. The Agreement of London, whether it originates or merely records, at all events marks a transition in international law which roughly corresponds to that in the evolution of local law when men ceased to punish crime by "hue and cry" and began to let reason and inquiry govern punishment. The society of nations has emerged from the primitive "hue and cry," the law of "catch and kill." It seeks to apply sanctions to enforce international law, but to guide their application by evidence, law, and reason instead of outcry. The defendants denounce the law under which their accounting is asked. Their dislike for the law which condemns them is not original. It has been remarked before that: "No thief o'er felt the halter draw with good opinion of the law."

I shall not labor the law of this case. The position of the United States was explained in my opening statement. My distinguished colleague, the Attorney General of Great Britain, will reply on behalf of all the chief prosecutors to the defendants' legal attack. At this stage of the proceedings, I shall rest upon the law of these crimes as laid down in the Charter. The defendants, who except for the Charter would have no right to be heard at all, now ask that the legal basis of this Trial be nullified. This Tribunal, of course, is given no power to set aside or modify the agreement between the Four Powers, to which 18 other nations have adhered. The terms of the Charter are conclusive upon every party to these proceedings.

In interpreting the Charter, however, we should not overlook the unique and emergent character of this body as an International Military Tribunal. It is no part of the constitutional mechanism of internal justice of any of the signatory nations. Germany has unconditionally surrendered, but no peace treaty has been signed or agreed upon. The Allies are still technically in a state of war with Germany, although the enemy's political and military institutions have collapsed. As a military tribunal, this Tribunal is a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations. As an International Tribunal, it is not bound by the procedural and substantive refinements of our respective judicial or constitutional systems, nor will its rulings introduce precedents into any country's internal system of civil justice. As an International Military Tribunal, it rises above the provincial and transient and seeks guidance not only from international law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization and which long have found embodiment in the codes of all nations."

The last line of that quote is pure Natural Law thought. Now, as you probably know, Congress called on President Washington to issue a proclamation thanking God for the freedoms that the American people would now enjoy immediately after they finished their work on the first amendment. I think you are reading history with 21st Century eyes and forgetting the context in which Jefferson wrote and in which the Constitution was drafted. Here is that proclamation as Washington released it:

"City of New York, October 3, 1789.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor, and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanks-giving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be. That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks, for his kind care and protection of the People of this country previous to their becoming a Nation, for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his providence, which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war, for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed, for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted, for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually, to render our national government a blessing to all the People, by constantly being a government of wise, just and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed, to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shown kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord. To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and Us, and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best."

I am not citing Natural Law in a religious manner Larry, but neither do I think it makes sense to try to portray the history of the founding of the nation as less theistic than it actually was. Jefferson did not see the word "God" in the Constitution, you are correct there. My understanding is that there was a desire to not have religious faith and government "married" as they were in England, but neither was there a secular state being established. I agree with Madison and the others as to how they did things, inasmuch as I would want to distance myself from certain people's understanding of the meaning of "God", and not be perceived as standing with them in the issuance of the Constitution were their concept of God somehow perceived as being bound up with the document.

I had to laugh at your phrase about pulling Natural Law out of a hat. The "hat" I hope to pull it out of is nature. Specifically, I want to base a minimum (Natural Law underdetermines ethical norms as it were) ethical code for the teaching of virtue upon what the sciences and social sciences demonstrate to be in the best interest of human beings.

Oh dear, all: I must have offended very badly, since my posts have apparently been removed. Apologies to Larry Carlson in particular are in order, I think.

However, Larry, I still take serious issue with you on the question of the historicity of the Biblical texts. For example, you contrast Matthew's Sermon on the Mount with Luke's Sermon on the Plain, giving three alternative readings: (i) Luke depends on Matthew, (ii) Matthew depends on Luke, (iii) both depend on multiple sayings of Jesus. It seems very plain to me that the third is the simplest account that respects all the facts; besides which, it is commonly observable that an itinerant preacher (as Jesus was) will certainly repeat himself multiple times with variations.

You suggest that it may be "an extant record of some simpler sermon". Why "simpler"? Do you think Jesus was a "simple" man? This flies in the face of all our experience of leaders of movements: these charismatic leaders are multiply complex! Of course they are: they are the initiators, they blaze the path that others only follow.

Then you state as a matter of fact that "the gospels were written by multiple editors with separate, distinctive styles, and arguably different prejudices and sometimes contradictory viewpoints, by people whose names and much of their alleged material was revised and/or conjured up by Church writers decades/centuries later...or else the same writer wrote parts of different gospels." You must know that this is a highly contentious position that is indeed very strongly contended. Louis is right to point out that such tightly written - indeed literary - work as the Gospels cannot be the work of a committee, nor was such practice known in the ancient world. Point me to any comparable substantial work from the first century that is the work of a committee! You think that the Gospels could be "centuries" later? The last scholar to seriously suggest any such thing was F.C.Baur in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he only dated Mark and John at about 150 AD (not "centuries", plural!). But Baur's work, depending on a dialectical (Hegelian) analysis rather than proper historical research, was fatally undermined by J.B.Lightfoot, who demonstrated very carefully that the first epistle of Clement and seven epistles of Ignatius were authentic and could be dated 95-6 and 110-5 respectively (Lightfoot's complete work was published by 1891: both Clement and Ignatius of course quote our Gospel texts many times). Baur's second century datings were groundless, and your assertions are not only groundless but well over a century out of date! J.A.T.Robinson has shown (in "Redating the New Testament", 1976) that not only is it entirely reasonable to date the entire New Testament before the fall of Jerusalem (70AD) but that the later datings beloved of revisionist writers are grounded on suppositions rather than good history. I am not aware that his work has been refuted so far. And by the way, "Q" remains entirely elusive!

You say, the Sermon on the Mount "certainly can readily be shown to be a piecing together of various previous codes". Of course the Hebrew Scriptures underlie it, just as they underlie the "Magnificat" (etc), but it is also a creative and unified synthesis that goes beyond the Hebrew texts.

You are worried about admitting arguments that may inadvertently encourage people who believe the Bible is true (and "inerrant") because it is "divinely inspired". I can't worry about this. If other people (not you!) want to twist my words, then that is their responsibility. Let me repeat, I think the Bible is true because I am persuaded that it is reliable. It is manifestly "inspired" in the sense that all high quality work is "inspired". But you are right to say that the question of its "special inspiration" (that would command obedience) is outside the philosophical scope of this forum.

I think that in one important way you are mistaken to compare Jesus with Socrates and Lao-Tzu. Both of the latter were making timeless philosophical points. And of course they were great men (or the invention of great men!) whose work remains valuable. But Jesus was making an historical point, not only timeless philosophical ones. He was saying, the kingdom of God is upon you! And this is also plain even in the Sermon on the Mount - count how many times he mentions the Kingdom. Jesus was a Jew! He breathed history! The Jews, alone in the ancient world, viewed history as progressive rather than cyclic. Truth was not, ultimately, timeless! Oh, and by the way, the historicity of Jesus himself has never been seriously doubted for long, and there is now a scholarly consensus that he was certainly an historical figure.

My point in all this, related to the Question of this thread, is that moral values have to be discussed in quasi-religious terms, that is, in language that would not feel out of place in a (suitably philosophical) religious discussion. Value is personal, and to be good people must be motivated to value what is good. Kant believed that he could construct an Imperative to do good out of logic (actually, he was subtler than this, but this is how he is usually presented). But this is a logical mistake. People must be persuaded to do good, and the persuasion must be at the level of motivation - that is, the religious level (whether or not the good person claims any religion).

Iris Murdoch more or less explicitly acknowledges this in the last essay of her "The Sovereignty of Good" (1970). She says, "Religion normally emphasises states of mind as well as actions, and regards states of mind as the genetic background of action: pureness of heart, meekness of spirit ... The believer feels that he needs, and can receive, extra help. 'Not I, but Christ' ... " (the references are to Matt.5:8; Gal.6:1; 2:20), although she rules out the existence of God: "There is, in my view, no God in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only one." I hesitate to criticise such a great philosopher, but she also admits to "simply asserting" that "human life has no external point or τελος": surely giving the Greek without any transliteration or translation is giving up the attempt to be persuasive? She admits later to a "bleak" point of view. I was sorry to see such a beautiful book ultimately fail to carry her point, although she does establish a long string of very substantial points along the way. My choices are opposite to hers: God is very much alive and he certainly has our end (τελος, telos, purpose) in view.

Chris,

The Jews were not alone about history. The Greek invented the modern concept of history, a narrative that aim to be objective and universal. The ancient Jews were interested into THEIR story focusing on its meaning and by that they meant their relation with God. The ancient Jews had no notion of theoretical time which is a greek invention but which is also a big illusion that led to the invention of the timeless. For the ancient Jews there were only cause and effects, no time in itself.

Plato did put 'THE GOOD'' at the top of its theory of forms. It never made sense to me since it is not a form.

Finally I am witth you about morality that has to be at the level of motivation which cannot be objectied because it is intrinsically personal, as Polanyi would have said.

Regards,

Sorry (again). My posts haven't been removed ... (must have been a senior moment ...)

Larry, I am confused that you say that I "refer to the Bible as a collection of 'myths' ". I quoted a whole paragraph of yours as "a collection of myths".

On inerrancy, I am not sure you understood what I said, and rereading my text I am not sure I said it very clearly ... Let me try again. I do not think it is useful to say that the Biblical text is "inerrant". I say instead that it is "reliable". I agree with you when you suggest it is improper to take the text as "indisputable" because it is "inspired". It is equally improper to believe it because it is the "Word of God". Contrariwise, we conclude that it is indeed the inspired word of God precisely because it holds together when it is disputed. It turns out to be reliable, and therefore we trust its inspiration; after all, it tells us itself to "test the spirits" (1John 4:1). The inspiration is not the reason for the indisputability. It is the opposite. It is because the text has demonstrable authenticity and integrity, because it is clearly of high literary quality, because it has a demonstrable accuracy where it can be checked independently, and because its historical context makes it entirely believable, these are the reasons for saying it is the inspired word of God.

Moreover, I think that the text itself assumes that the reader demands to be persuaded. The canonical authors are making their points in the way any authors make their points. Are we persuaded? In support of this I merely point to Paul, who said, "Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind" (Rom.14:5); this is only one of very many passages that explicitly support my assertion.

Why should humans be able to have any insight in an objective perspective? We are subjective beings, and watching some processes and relations between the concepts we make and throw over the world we can distill some 'truths'. However, these 'truths' are always intra-contextual. Deriving from empirical observation we can say that there is gravity between masses, but mass is a human concept, therefore this 'truth' is merely valid and viable within our own conceptual framework. Morality is a man-made concept, which by the way is highly emotionally laden and therefore even much more human-context-dependent than e.g., gravity. Sorry, but I think, thinking that we as subjective beings are capable of defining an 'objective morality', thus a fundamentally valid definition of good and bad, which is subject-independently true for all times and all possible worlds, generated on the basis of a concept we invented, is pure human arrogance.

Wow - one cannot take a hiatus away from this thread without falling way behind. I was gone for a week and I come back to discover we're addressing the historicity of the New Testament and the Jewish concept of time.

Chris, that is a great synopsis of the state of New Testament studies today, Newer authors and researchers than some whom you've mentioned only make your point even more fully.

Louis, Interestingly, Thomas Cahill claims in The Gift of the Jews (this is the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization) that the linear concept of time comes to us directly from the Jews. Being a student of Ancient Near Eastern civilizations and cultures, as well as Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Biblical Palestinian culture I would have to say that although the Jews often do not write with the same concern for Kairos time that we have, they truly do have a linear conception. Ecclesiastes, which is written from an intentionally more secular perspective than the rest of the Kethubim, is really the only Biblical Jewish book which portrays the cyclical and repetitive view of history which is so prevalent in the ancient world. It is doing so intentionally to show the "hevel" (either futility or transitoriness) of life "under the sun".

Larry, We can kick the ball of moral relativism around all day. The most famous example of it is that which Herodotus gives of King Darius addressing the Callatians and the Greeks regarding their treatment of their dead fathers. The Callatians ate them whereas the Greeks cremated them. The Callatians were horrified at the notion of cremation of their dead, whilst the Greeks were disgusted and sickened by the notion of eating their dead. The fact is that at bottom, once we get done making qualifications for extenuating circumstances, such as you've raised with Dostoevsky and Robin Hood, there appears to be a moral "least common denominator" that people only (on the surface anyway) violate due to either an exercise of power by corrupt members of their society or a wrongful/mythical notion of the nature of reality. Numerous cultural anthropologists have made this realization and written about this fact at length. Unfortunately, the more extreme and sensational claims always get the greater attention.

I disagree with you about slave owners and those who commit genocide. I have spent a large portion of my adult life in counseling others and I have to tell you that many war veterans who did not participate in a massacre such as My Lai and who believe they conducted themselves with integrity and honor in battle, struggle all of their lives with guilt for those lives they took in war. I believe that Thomas Jefferson, whom we now know fathered bi-racial children with his slaves, couldn't help but be aware, in some part of himself, that his treatment of those slaves was wrong. The human conscience and thought process is not quite as skillful at desensitization and rationalization as we sometimes believe it to be, though it may appear so on the surface.

I am now saying this line for the third time on this thread, "Try to imagine a society dedicated to selfishness, cowardice, dishonesty, and injustice as moral goods. It is literally unimaginable." You can only get just so far with moral relativism. The primary factor which militates against any greater plasticity of moral values is, as far as I can see, human nature and what makes for human thriving.

Louis, you say "The Greeks invented the modern concept of history, a narrative that aims to be objective and universal." This is correct, and you are correct to distinguish it from Jewish history which is explicitly subjective, as you also say. I go into further details in my book on the Psalms, see :-

www.surrey.ac.uk/ati/ibc/files/Psalms.pdf‎

Then you say "The ancient Jews had no notion of theoretical time". Well, I can see what you mean, but Bill is entirely correct that our concept of linear time is Jewish, not Greek; moreover, theoretical time cannot really exist where one cannot shake off the idea that time is cyclic. You have to cite your sources to establish that the Greeks used theoretical time - I don't believe you. But here is an interesting source from me. Augustine was the first (I think) to clearly state the logical position that time itself has a beginning (in City of God, 426AD, XI:6; also in Confessions, c.417AD, XII:15). Note that this beginning of time itself is also a corollary of the "gravitational singularity" theorem of Hawking & Penrose (1970). Augustine's argument that establishes this is interesting (and also valid). He says that time is only known by the motion of things, and prior to creation there were no things; ergo, neither was there time! He cites Gen.1:14 to establish his case: God's creation of the "great and lesser lights" to "govern" the day and night (sun & moon), and the stars, was specifically to tell the time. Note that immaterial time is not a scientific concept - SI units define time specifically as the motion of a thing (certain vibrations of the 133Cs atom) - the International Committee for Weights and Measures takes the same view as Augustine! It seems to me that "theoretical time" was a Christian idea based on Jewish sources (and strongly influenced by Greek rationality).

You are also right to say that Plato "put 'THE GOOD' at the top of his theory of forms", and my citing and critique of Iris Murdoch previously is also a critique of Plato. It is also indirectly a critique of Bill's project, since he wants to establish some universals to serve as the ground of a robust ethic. I think that he cannot escape by saying he is an Aristotelian and not a Platonist. I want to remind everyone of Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies" (1946), Book I of which was a passionate and vigorous attack on Platonism. Brilliant and persuasive. No-one today is a Platonist - Popper excludes this - just as no-one today is an Aristotelian - Galileo (and Luther) excluded that!

Unfortunately I cannot escape the thought that Murdoch chose her book title ("The Sovereignty of Good") to invoke the thought of "The Sovereignty of God". Which thought is, however, fatal to her project!

Here is the only reference I have read on '' the hebrew concept of time''

by Ronnie Littlejohn

http://www.ovrlnd.com/Eschatology/hebrewconceptoftime.html

I found the reading of this short text fascinating because modern physics began with a absolute time (Galileo,Descartes,Newton) which is a spatialization or geometrization of time (Bergson) in the spirit of the ancient Greek notion of time as a container of events. The evolution of physics has later evolved away from absolute time to a relational time in General relativity and in the new quantum gravity theories being built now. This relational time was forecast to be necessary by Leibniz in his famous controversy with Newton, and when you look at it, it is strangely close to the ancient Hebrew concept of time.