Interesting Critique of Naturalism

by Perry 8 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

  • Perry
    Perry

    Naturalism and Ethics

    Why is it that certain actions are morally right, others morally wrong, and some morally neutral? Where does the demand of normativity come from? For much of the history of philosophy, the basis for ethics was grounded in non-natural entities. In fact, the kind of truths found in ethics seem inescapably non-natural. Below, I will show the basic problems for naturalism to give an account of ethics. If naturalism cannot provide an adequate basis for morality, then that counts strongly against the worldview of naturalism.

    What is and is Not Under Discussion

    From the outset I want to be clear that this argument has nothing to do with whether naturalists or non-naturalists are morally good or bad people. It's evidently clear that many naturalists are among the most morally commendable in society. Conversely, there are many people who believe in a non-natural basis for morality who act atrociously. The point here is not to figure out how these different groups act. Rather, the idea is to see whether philosophical naturalism provides a sufficient basis for morality. In other words, this is an issue primarily concerning meta-ethics, not practical ethics.

    Ethics Naturalized

    Philosophical naturalism is a theory that holds to a minimal ontology where all that exists must be physical/material or reducible in some way to physical/material substances. The challenge for naturalists is to explain how certain claims, like "Torturing babies for fun is morally wrong," are true on their account. What natural thing makes moral claims true? The answer naturalists give to this question, which I will discuss below, is woefully inadequate.

    One attempt to naturalize ethics is to appeal to natural selection. According to this view, we believe moral claims as a result of natural selection. Why do we think killing innocent people is wrong? The defender of natural selection will say we believe this because societies where innocent people were killed without punishment didn't survive and pass on their genes. In order to survive, certain moral rules had to be adopted. Those communities and individuals who did not adopt these rules did not survive. So, in this way some naturalists try to show how natural selection would give a naturalized account of ethics.

    The problem with this approach is that it doesn't give an account for why certain actions are morally right and wrong. This naturalist attempt only offers an explanation as to why we happen to think some things are right and wrong. This subtle distinction is crucially important in order to understand why this attempt to naturalize ethics fails. How would this type of naturalism handle, for example, the claim "murder is wrong"? The naturalist would explain that we believe and strive to follow this rule because our species has been psychologically programmed to believe it is true as a consequence of natural selection. But it is still unknown whether this moral claim is, in fact, true. After accepting this theory, one could ask oneself, "I understand why I happen to think murder is wrong, but is it really wrong? Is there any real restraint against me committing acts of murder?" And on the natural selection view, there is no reason to think any action is really right or wrong in the moral sense.

    Here's another way to see the same criticism. If natural selection is supposed to provide the basis for moral right and wrong, then morality is founded upon an arbitrary foundation. Natural selection would explain the processes which have conditioned us to believe and behave in accordance with certain moral beliefs. Yet, if our moral framework is merely the by-product of mindless, impersonal conditioning, then it seems utterly arbitrary that we happen to believe these moral truths rather than any other. So, on this view, there is no reason to think that murder is wrong. We believe it is wrong merely because of the impersonal accidents of physical matter struggling to survive over time.

    Many naturalists, aware of this sort of problem, take a different approach to naturalize ethics. They claim that ethics is not about cognitive claims that can be characterized as "true" or "false." Rather, moral claims are of a different type - moral claims only contain expressive meaning. This is called expressivism. On this view, moral claims express "pro" and "anti" feelings of the person making the claim. As such, these claims are not "true" or "false." To say, for example, that "murder is wrong" means "murder, boo!" or "murder yuck!" for expressivists.

    This approach is favorable to naturalism because there is no need to speak about why moral claims are true or false. An expressivist can say that asking "why moral expressions are true or false?" is a category mistake. There is no need to give a basis for the truth-value of ethical normative claims because these aren't claims that can be classified as true or false.

    Expressivism is all the rage in contemporary attempts to naturalize ethics. If successful, expressivism deflects the requirement to explain moral truths. The tug of moral rights and wrongs require no deeper metaphysical explanation than acknowledging that moral claims are expressions of people. What explains why moral expressions exist? The naturalist needs only to appeal to the existence of people who have these expressions.

    One of the key problems for expressivism is that it denies an independent measure for moral claims by which we can assess the moral expressions of people. So if Jones says, "Torturing babies for fun is morally good," on what grounds can we say Jones is wrong? For Jones, if he happens to feel that this expression is correct, and the basis for a moral claim is in the agent's expression, the agent can never give an incorrect moral expression. There is no plausible "error theory" for moral claims, if expressivism is true. Every agent's moral expression would be correct, which would have devastating consequences. Some might say that we could appeal to the moral expressions of the majority of people in a society, but this won't help. By taking a survey of what most people feel about moral claims would not prove that Jones is making a wrong expression, it would (at best) show he is abnormal or that he has different tastes from most people. Since some people make erroneous moral claims, and expressivism cannot account for errors in moral claims, it follows that expressivism is wrong.

    Another problem with expressivism follows from its denial of truth-values for moral claims. If moral claims lack truth-value, we should not be able to use them in logical proofs to infer conclusions since logic derives inferences on the grounds that claims are true or false. (In the philosophical literature this criticism is called the "Frege-Geach Problem.") Consider the following line of reasoning:

    1. It is wrong to torture babies for fun.
    2. Smith is a baby.
      Therefore,
    3. It is wrong to torture Smith for fun.

    Premise (2) is a factual claim that has a true or false value, but (1), according to expressivists, is not. Since (1) is neither true nor false, one cannot logically derive the conclusion (3) from the principles of logic (try doing a truth-table with claims that are not true or false, and you'll see what I mean). The problem for expressivists is that a proof like the one given above is sound, and that their view cannot account for any moral reasoning of this sort.

    Another problem with expressivism is that it is indistinguishable from relativism. Many expressivists try to resist relativism, but it is difficult to see any difference between expressivism and relativism. If the meaning of moral claims are grounded in the expressions of people, and people have different expressions, then it follows that expressivism entails relativism. Moral relativism, of course, is untenable. Unless expressivists can show how their view is different from relativism, they will not be able to avoid the same criticisms that show relativism is false.

    Conclusion

    Naturalists cannot account for the truth-value of moral claims. Attempts to naturalize the truth-claims by recourse to natural selection fail because moral "oughts" cannot be derived by explaining the psychological conditions that program them. Additionally, attempts by naturalists to show that moral claims have no truth-value fail as well. Thus, naturalism leaves the truth of moral claims inexplicable. For this reason, naturalism cannot account for the fundamental truths of ethics. Therefore, naturalism is an inadequate philosophical system.

  • Anti-Christ
    Anti-Christ

    Something I find interesting so I'll cut and past

    We evolved as a social primate, according to Shermer, "with an ascending hierarchy of needs from self-survival of the individual (basic biological needs), to the extension of the individual through the family (the selfish gene), to a sense of bonding with the extended family (driven by kin selection [or] helping those most related to us), to the reciprocal altruism of the community (direct and obvious payback for good behaviors), to indirect altruism of society (doing good without direct payback), to species altruism and bioaltruism as awareness of our membership in the species and biosphere continue[d] to develop" (20).

    The way I see it if the god of the bible is real the only way to determine what is good or bad is based on what he says. Murder is wrong but if god kills it's O.K. Having more than one wife is wrong now but it was once O.K. because god said so.

    The problem with this approach is that it doesn't give an account for why certain actions are morally right and wrong. This naturalist attempt only offers an explanation as to why we happen to think some things are right and wrong. This subtle distinction is crucially important in order to understand why this attempt to naturalize ethics fails. How would this type of naturalism handle, for example, the claim "murder is wrong"? The naturalist would explain that we believe and strive to follow this rule because our species has been psychologically programmed to believe it is true as a consequence of natural selection. But it is still unknown whether this moral claim is, in fact, true. After accepting this theory, one could ask oneself, "I understand why I happen to think murder is wrong, but is it really wrong? Is there any real restraint against me committing acts of murder?" And on the natural selection view, there is no reason to think any action is really right or wrong in the moral sense.

    So the only reason somebody who believes in god would not do something wrong is because god said so and if you do not obey you will be punished. So why is that any better?

  • Narkissos
    Narkissos

    This is at worst a logical fallacy, at best a very superficial issue imo. Ethics are, and have always been, the cultural product of social convention (which in turn results from a very natural necessity); they were always determined through power struggle and negotiation, and reproduced through education; diachronically their contents have always been changing. Whether the currently accepted morality is construed as divine law, monarchical law, or "the will of the people" only affects the mythological dressing of the same basic process. In the past, when the social convention changed as a result of a new balance of forces, a prophetic or priestly class would come up with an authoritative oracle corresponding to the new consensus. Now we speak of steps in "collective consciousness" when we suddenly "realise" that slavery, child labour, racism, sexism, homophobia, corporeal punishments, death penalty, imprisonment,etc. are "morally inacceptable". I wouldn't say we lie less to ourselves: we just lie otherwise.

  • PrimateDave
    PrimateDave

    This is from Alice Miller's book For Your Own Good:

    We admire people who oppose the regime in a totalitarian country and think they have courage or a "strong moral sense" or have remained "true to their principles" or the like. We may also smile at their naïveté, thinking, "Don't they realize that their words are of no use at all against this oppressive power? That they will have to pay dearly for their protest?"

    Yet it is possible that both those who admire and those who scorn these protesters are missing the real point: individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out of a sense of duty or because of naïveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves. The longer I wrestle with these questions, the more I am inclined to see courage, integrity, and a capacity for love not as "virtues," not as moral categories, but as the consequences of a benign fate.

    Morality and performance of duty are artificial measures that become necessary when something essential is lacking. The more successfully a person was denied access to his or her feelings in childhood, the larger the arsenal of intellectual weapons and the supply of moral prostheses has to be, because morality and a sense of duty are not sources of strength or fruitful soil for genuine affection. Blood does not flow in artificial limbs; they are for sale and can serve many masters. What was considered good yesterday can--depending on the decree of government or party--be considered evil and corrupt today, and vice versa. But those who have spontaneous feelings can only be themselves. They have no other choice if they want to remain true to themselves. Rejection, ostracism, loss of love, and name calling will not fail to affect them; they will suffer as a result and will dread them, but once they have found their authentic self they will not want to lose it. And when they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it. They simply cannot.

    Basically, a person acts on his feelings regardless of whether he claims belief in a god or not. How many people really go through the intellectual process you are describing in your post? The whole idea of meta-ethics as described seems to be so much "intellectual weapons and moral prosthesis" for those who have become emotional amputees. Just my opinion anyway.

    Dave

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    The interesting thing about the ethics supposedly practiced by Christians is that it is just as arbitrary as the author of the above article argues naturalistically derived ethics is. Arbitrary you say? How can that be?

    Christians supposedly get their ethics from God, or more accurately, from the Bible, which they claim is authored by the Christian God in one way or another. But this God can arbitrarily decide that some action is morally good and another is morally bad. Why? Because God is, well, God -- an all powerful, all beneficient, all wise being. Thus, an action can be good one day and bad the next, if God changes his mind. The Bible contains examples of its God doing this.

    If this God decides that torturing babies for fun is good, then Christians must necessarily accede that it is good -- even if it is naturaly repugnant to them.

    Now, some Christian might argue that God's ethical standards are not arbitrary, but are dictated by what everyone would agree are good ethics and moral standards. But that argument inescapably leads to the conclusion that a set of good ethical/moral standards exists apart from God. Where, then, do such standards come from? From the same sort of naturalism that the author of the above essay is arguing against.

    Christians who claim that God's standards are not arbitrary are hard pressed to answer simple questions like, "If God said that torturing babies for fun is good, would you torture babies?"

    Let's see how this actually works with our Christian apologist Perry.

    Perry, if God said that it's fun to torture babies, and morally right to do so, and it was pleasing to him for you to do it, would you?

    AlanF

  • AlanF
    AlanF

    I see that Perry doesn't seem to want to answer my question.

    No surprise.

    AlanF

  • PrimateDave
    PrimateDave

    Psalm 137 (Jewish Publication Society Tanakh)

    8 Fair Babylon, you predator,

    a blessing on him who repays you in kind

    what you have inflicted on us;

    9 a blessing on him who seizes your babies

    and dashes them against the rocks!

    Sounds to me like God approves of torturing babies under the "right" circumstances.

    Dave

  • Abaddon
    Abaddon

    This is predictable trash from Perry; he recently had to tell god that god couldn't be part of Perry's religion as god didn't come up to Perry's standards...

    If I thought there was the remotest chance there might be a rewarding discussion with him, I'd take the time to point out that the concept of human rights is an extremely good platform upon which to base ethics, in addition to listing the legion errors in the argument he has plagiarized without accreditation (http://apologetics.johndepoe.com/naturalism-ethics.html) It is a good thing Perry believes he is already saved, as that way he can be dishonest and still retain the self-righteousness so essential to his personality. It is also interesting he lacks the courage to do anything but this cut and paste heroics; I suppose despite appearances to the contrary he is at least smart enough to avoid debate with people he knows from experience will simply make him look stupid. But what do you expect from a parrot? It's quite impressive a parrot can manipulate a mouse and press CTRL C or CTRL V at the same time, but making sense as well ? The least his owner could do is scrape all the guano off the parrot's perch...
  • kid-A
    kid-A

    You see Perry, birds have their own holy book,.....unfortunately, like you, they mostly use it for spreading crap........

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