On the Modernity/Post-Modernity Distinction

About two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of Europe.

– Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p.3

Modernity is often characterized as arrogant atheists asserting the autonomous and apodictic authority of reason. Post-Modernity is often characterized as lily-livered liberals playing loosey-goosey with the idea of such an authority. For those of us who just love to reject simple dualisms, this quote proves a delicious treat.

Ethics and Reality – Part 1: David Hume’s Critique

In this post and the next I’ll be discussing ethics and how it is related to reality. The question I want to pose and offer some thoughts on is: in what sense can our ethics be derived from observing, living in, thinking about, and feeling our way through the reality we inhabit? In ethics, this is usually termed the question of ‘moral realism’, and attracts related questions such as: are there objective moral facts? Are these moral facts universal or contingent? Is certain knowledge in ethics possible? If so, how is it acquired?

Addressing this issue is a good place to begin in thinking about ethics, since what answer you reach on this abstract question will shape how you proceed in the normative and concrete arena as you actually decide upon and judge specific acts. So someone who held that ethics and reality were strongly linked could consistently prescribe moral laws, hold these to be universal, and believe they are justified through reference to a natural or moral order. Someone who held that there is no clear or necessary connection between reality and ethics could consistently hold to a more relativist ethics or an ethics based on personal taste, goals or pleasure, or insist that it is necessary for humans to construct ethics for mutual benefit. I’ll being by addressing this latter kind.

The Eighteenth Century Scottish philosopher David Hume introduced a famous distinction into ethics, insisting that an ‘is’ is not and ‘ought’. That is, there is no logical connection between statements which describe the world – the world ‘is’ this way – and statements which recommend or command a certain kind of action – you ‘ought’ to do this. For example, there is no logical connection between someone telling me that there is delicious coffee in Newtown, and their telling me that I ought to go purchase some. Hume felt that something was going unsaid here, and there was no clean correlation between the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ statements. He states:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.  – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), III.I.i

Hume had Christian and Greek ethics in his sights. Since Aristotle, much of ethics has been was influenced by attempting to derive what the natural function of a thing is, and then to ascribe excellence (or virtue) to that thing if it executed its function well. So to judge whether a human being was virtuous, one needed to engage in the prior task of description in order to ascertain what the natural purpose of a human being was, and then to judge whether this particular human being was executing his natural function. Just as a good hammer is one which is able to do some good hammering, a good human is the one which is able to do some good human-ing. This argument may sound odd or obvious, but it is still frequently appealed to in normative ethical discussions. ‘A study of human biology shows you that human beings were built for heterosexuality, therefore homosexuality is unnatural and wrong’, or ‘Proper activity for young ladies is to get married, contribute to the community and respect their elders, therefore those that don’t are witches and witchcraft is wrong’ (that last one might be drawing a bit of a long bow, but you get the picture).

Christian ethics was influenced by this Aristotelian model in the early church, and it added to it the existence of a God and the existence of a moral order. Hence, most contemporary Christian ethics begins with a description of God, an insistence that a moral order has been placed in creation by the Creator, and normative statements derived from and justified by this.

Hume’s critique stands as a challenge to this whole approach to ethics which seeks to derive any moral truth from a description of the natural or supra-natural world. He maintained that there is a world of difference between saying that something is real about the world, and this necessarily leading us to do something as a result. In the next post, I’ll outline an alternative account of reality and ethics.

Atheism vs. Theism: The Wrong Paradigm?

 

Controversy over Christianity is almost never conducted in the terms in which it is usually discussed by professional apologists, namely, “theism versus atheism”. The options are far wider that these anachronistic choices – choices that smack of Enlightenment-era European debates. To be sure, one might encounter nowadays a discussion between a theist and an atheist, but the theist could well be a Muslim, a Sikh, or a Hindu and the atheist a Thervadin Buddhist, philosophical Confucianist, or postmodern pragmatist. More commonly, however, the question is not, “Do you believe in God?” but “Which God or gods do you believe in?” – John Stackhouse Jr., Humble Apologetics (2002), p. 12

“Are you an atheist or a theist?” In the above excerpt, John Stackhouse suggests that this question is not as important as is usually thought. Debates about religion, faith, philosophy and worldview often come back to this question, assuming that it is the fundamental question that needs to be answered, and that it therefore ought to have a kind of priority over other questions. The thought goes: if we can just sort out whether you are an atheist or a theist and why, then we will be in a better position to move forward, or will know the right kinds of questions to be asking one another. Stackhouse calls this whole paradigm into question, suggesting that this kind of foundationalist thinking is a relic from Enlightenment-era thinking, which we need not see as the best way to discuss worldview and faith.

Stackhouse is saying that although atheism is a more abstract category than Marxism, and theism is a more abstract concept than Christianity, it need not be given a priority as the first issue that needs to be settled, and it need not take up residence as the focus of the debate between worldviews. This thought resonates with me because I see atheism and theism as being commitments which are entailed in other ideologies, where the ideologies themselves are more commonly the objects of decision. To overstate things – it is more common, and perhaps more natural, for people to choose an ideology first, and then to discover that atheistic or theistic commitments are bound up in what they have chosen, and to choose this ideology for reasons not necessarily linked with the atheism vs. theism debate. Most people choose Christianity (or whatever) not because they have first been convinced of theism, and most people choose Marxism (or whatever) not because they have first been convinced of atheism.

To dig a little deeper, perhaps this is because atheism and theism are too abstract to set real agendas, but too large to be ignored. If this is so, it explains why almost all worldviews have something to say about atheism or theism, and goes someway to explaining the plurality within each camp. To focus just on atheism: In a world without God, Marxists are able argue for the unique importance of the political and the urgent need for economic and social change; Feminists are able to argue for the contingency of the status quo and in some cases the fluidity of gender; Continental philosophers are able to argue for the relativity of value; Analytic philosophers are helped in arguing for empiricism as the most reliable way of knowing; and popular individualist consumerism in able to hold comfortably to beliefs in happiness as the supreme good, and the self as being of supreme importance.

This is all very cursory, but the point I’m gesturing towards is that atheism or theism can be employed for various worldviews and philosophies to bolster their own ideology. The five approaches I have just mentioned are starkly different – Marxists are not renowned for getting along with individualist-consumerists and Analytic philosophers are not renowned for getting along with Continental philosophers. It is not that these approaches have reached a consensus that God does not exist, but that atheism is a helpful, but by no means dominant, facet of their worldviews which are ultimately driven by other agendas.

Given this, Christian apologetics and conversation with others ought not to proceed by trying to settle the atheism/theism debate as though the whole ball game was riding on it. Much better to attempt to get inside of another worldview, and compare it’s beliefs, hopes and agenda with the words and works of Jesus of Nazareth. This makes the potential apologetic conversation much more complex, as the discussion has moved from comparing two abstract ideas, to comparing one worldview (Christianity) with a seemingly infinite plurality of others. It makes the conversation more exciting, since if atheism vs. theism is not the foundational issue, then it means you may begin to get towards the heart of things – the reasons people have chosen one ideology over another, and why they have done this. For a funny take on all this – check out how quickly the comedian Rick Gervais was able to dismiss Christianity once the conversation was framed in terms of atheism or theism, rather than the agenda, beliefs and hopes of Christianity compared with another ideology.

Is Disagreement in Ethics a Virtue?

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture.”

– Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981), p. 6

This quote points to two large question which loom over any ethical discussion, and which moral philosophers often try to ignore. Why is there disagreement in the first place? and What would it even take for one of us to win? I suspect most moral philosophers take it for granted as an unavoidable fact about human culture that there will be different conceptions of good and bad, right and wrong, and also that reaching some sort of consensus on these issue is really beyond the grasp of humanity. The best moral philosophy can do is try to control the tide, and be a means of recommending certain ethical theories over others; or give a rational and articulate voice to people’s present desires. However, if you let these two questions sink in a little bit, they become disturbing and uncomfortable.

MacIntyre suggests that the reason for the confusion, and the reason for the interminable nature of the debate is due to the Enlightenment. During this movement, Christian and Greek ways of talking about ethics were rejected, but the vocabulary was kept – justice, virtue, good and evil. Removed from their context, these words quickly became fluid and muddy, to the point where no-one was really sure of anything in ethics anymore except that there was disagreement, and the prospect of reaching a universal consensus was laughable.

Christianity presents an alternative to contemporary moral debate. It holds that many important meta-ethical and normative concerns are able to be resolved, and that this result would be of great importance to human life. It also suggests that the present confusion about moral issues is not a natural thing, and reaching clarity and consensus on a number of moral issues is a possibility for humanity.

Confusing disagreement with the virtues of open debate, many believe that disagreement qua disagreement is a valuable thing. Perhaps it is time to ask – where has moral disagreement got us as a culture? Why do we have the knee-jerk reaction to value disagreement, and be skeptical of consensus?