So it appears
that Josh Stein, a.k.a. the philosotroll, was not
a fan of my most recent appearance on Life Report. Well, can’t please em’ all I suppose. But I
was curious as to what Stein found so objectionable in my appearance on episode #150
where I discussed the question, “What makes human beings valuable?”
Stein first
attacks my discussion of the “imago dei” as being a sufficient reason to grant
the right to life to unborn children and, in the end, all humans. According to
this view, human beings are valuable because they are made in God’s image and
are given a special value, or sacredness, because they stand in a special
relationship to God. I suspect that
Stein is an atheist and so that is why he considers the view so objectionable.
But aside from ridicule, he gives us no reason to reject the traditional Judeo-Christian
ethic that humans are valuable because God created them.
Even secular,
pro-choice philosophers like David Boonin admit that this argument would work
if God exists. Boonin evaluates the following pro-life argument in his book A
Defense of Abortion:
P1. The fetus
is a human life from the moment of conception
P2. Every
human life is sacred
P3. If the
life of an individual is sacred, then the individual has a right to life.
C. The fetus
has a right to life from the moment of conception
Boonin says
the argument is “plainly valid” and he assumes that P1 is true. The question is whether P3 and P2 are true
and follow from one another. Boonin
writes, “If ‘sacred’ is used in the religious
sense in P2, then, as I have suggested, P3 may well seem reasonable.”
[David Boonin. A Defense of Abortion. (Cambridge University Press, New York,
2003) 31.] So if the religious assumptions could be grounded or proved, then we
would have a good moral (but not necessarily legal) argument against abortion.
Stein says I
“aggressively ignored” how to explain the imago dei to an atheist, but I for
the life of me can’t see what he means.
Of course, I would have to present some compelling reasons to believe
that God exists in order for an atheist to understand or accept the imago dei
argument. The atheist may disagree with those reasons, but that doesn’t mean
he’s right. For someone who thinks I’m
so ignorant of Kant (or at least neo-Kantian philosophy) he seems to forget
that the moral argument for God (though not the form I use) came
from Kant himself so it isn’t some crackpot argument but has real merit
that is explored by contemporary philosophers.
Stein then
argues that my claim that objective truths must be grounded, and especially
that they must (or even can) be grounded in God is “audacious” and
“unjustified.” Really? What about theists
like Robert
Adams, Phillip
Quinn, and Jerry
Walls who argue for moral realism based on theism. Or, consider atheists who reject moral
realism because moral realism would entail the existence of God. J.L. Mackie, an influential atheist who wrote
in his book The Miracle of Theism that, “Moral
properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they
are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an
all-powerful god to create them.”
[J.L. Mackie. The Miracle of Theism
(Oxford, Clarendon: 1982), 115]
Stein says that I ironically begged the question when I said
that using the Bible to prove abortion is wrong would be a fallacious appeal to
authority but the imago dei is not such a fallacy. Here I simply disagree and
would say that I have independent reasons to believe that God exists and endows
humans with value (unlike the circular reasoning found in Biblical
fundamentalism). So no, I haven’t begged the question at all.
Next,
Stein says that I am completely mistaken that atheistic moral realism assumes
that moral facts exist as brute facts without explanation. Here he is partially
correct. I should have been clearer and said that under atheistic moral realism
moral facts either have no explanation in any other facts (i.e. brute facts) or
they are explained by themselves. After all, someone could be a Platonic moral
realist who believes that moral facts or objective values exist as eternal
forms and explain their own existence just as God explains his own existence. Even
if this were true, we would still need the brute fact that explains why we
should be morally compelled to follow platonic virtues like love and courage
instead of platonic vices like hate or cowardice. Plato proposed the GOOD as
that which grounds the other virtues. I just drop one of the “O’s” and I think
we’ve found the answer.
So
in regards to morality being a brute fact, that’s why during my appearance on the show I cited Dartmouth
philosophy professor Walter-Sinnott Armstrong who answers the question, “Why is
it wrong to cause harm without a good reason?” by saying “It just is, don’t you
agree?” (Page
47) To me, this seems to be an appeal to the self-evident truth that it is
wrong to cause suffering. But there’s no reason why it’s wrong. It just is --
or it’s a brute fact. Atheist Erik Wielenberg who authored the book Value
and Virtue in a Godless Universe, writes:
Of the ethical states of affairs that obtain necessarily, at least some are brute facts. That pain is intrinsically bad is not explained in terms of other states of affairs that obtain. Moreover, at least some necessarily obtaining brute ethical facts are not trivial but substantive. Therefore, I have an ontological commitment shared by many theists: I am committed to the obtaining of substantive, metaphysically necessary, brute facts. (Page 26)
(And
a note to Stein: I have taken nominalism such as the kind advocated by people
like Quine and Sellars seriously. I just think it’s a false view in
metaphysics. Also, while popular, is certainly not a
majority view in philosophy today.)
Stein
also says that the future-like-ours argument does not work because some traits
we have do not persist through time. For example, he writes, “Trent would not
claim that the moral standing of a six-year-old is the same as the moral
standing of a thirty-year-old when it comes to, for example, culpability.” Of
course not, because moral culpability is a property that emerges from other
properties and traits (such as intelligence, experience, and moral
awareness). Culpability refers to psychology so yes, it would be fluid and
not persist through time in a constant fashion, but the FLO argument refers to metaphysics and Stein simply has not
refuted it.
In
the end I would say that in this post I’ve only seen complaints, and not
arguments, that are supposed to refute the position I presented on Life Report.
