A second exchange with Keith Parsons, Part I

I’d like once again to thank Keith Parsons, and moderator Jeffery Jay Lowder, for the very fruitful first exchange we had a few weeks ago.  You can find links to each installment here.  Per Jeff’s suggestion, our second exchange will be on the topic: ”Can morality have a rational justification if atheism or naturalism is true?”  Jeff has proposed that we keep our opening statements to 2500 words or less, and I will try to rein in my logorrheic self and abide by that limitation.  That will be difficult, though, given that my answer to the question is: “Yes and No.”

Let me explain.  I’ll begin by making a point I’m sure Keith will agree with.  Many theists and atheists alike suppose that to link morality to religion is to claim that we could have no reason to be moral if we did not anticipate punishments and rewards in an afterlife.  I am sure Keith would reject such a line of argument, and I reject it too.  To do or refrain from doing something merely because one seeks a reward or fears reprisals is not morality.  I would also reject the related but distinct claim that what makes an action morally good or bad is merely that God has commanded it, as if goodness and badness were a matter of sheer fiat on the part of a cosmic dictator who has the power to impose his will on everyone else.  This too would not really be morality at all, but just Saddam Hussein writ large.

So, I reject crude divine command theories of morality.  That is one reason I think it is not quite right to claim that there can be no justification of morality if atheism were true; or at least, what (probably) most people understand by that claim is, in my view, false.  Crude divine command theories simply get morality wrong.  They get God wrong too.

More on that, perhaps, later in this exchange.  But first, another reason the claim in question is not quite right -- or at least way too quick -- has to do with what actually is the foundation of morality, or in any event the proximate foundation.  Like Philippa Foot, I would argue that goodness and badness are natural features of the world.  In particular, they have to do with a thing’s either realizing or failing to realize the ends toward which it is directed given its nature.  For example, a tree, given its nature, is directed toward ends like sinking roots into the ground, carrying out photosynthesis, and so forth.  To the extent it realizes these ends it is a good tree in the sense of a good specimen or instance of a tree, a healthy or flourishing tree.   To the extent it fails to do so, it is a bad tree in the sense of a bad specimen, a sickly or defective tree.  Similarly, a lioness is directed by her nature toward ends like hunting, moving her cubs about, and so forth.  To the extent she does so she is a good or flourishing specimen of a lioness, and to the extent she fails to do so she is a bad or defective specimen.  And so on for other living things.

Now so far this is a non-moral sense of “goodness” and “badness,” but moral goodness and badness are just special cases of the more general notions.  In particular, moral goodness or badness is the sort exhibited by a rational creature when he chooses either to act in a way conducive to the realization of the ends toward which his nature directs him, or to act in a way that frustrates those ends.  The goodness or badness of a plant or non-human animal is sub-ethical because they cannot understand what is good for them or will to pursue it.  Our goodness or badness is of an ethical sort because we can understand and will these things.  And it is irrational for us not to try to understand and to will them insofar as practical reason is by nature directed toward discerning the good, and the will is by nature directed toward pursuing the good. 

This is just a brief summary of the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) natural law conception of the good, and obviously it raises many questions.  I have developed and defended this conception at greater length elsewhere (such as in chapter 5 of my book Aquinas, in the first half of my Social Philosophy and Policy article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” and in my article “Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good,” in the volume Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, edited by Daniel Novotný and Lukás Novák).  Keith would no doubt disagree with a lot of what the A-T position has to say, but the point for the moment is to emphasize something else with which Keith might agree.  Just as what is good or bad for a tree or lioness is grounded in the natures of those things, so too is morality grounded in human nature.  Moral goodness, like these other kinds of goodness, is in that way what Foot calls “natural goodness.”  But human nature is something a person can know and understand whether or not he believes in God, just as he can understand the nature of an oak tree or a lioness whether or not he believes in God.  Hence there is a sense in which one could give a rational justification of morality even if he were an atheist.

I say that Keith might agree with this not just for the obvious reason that he is an atheist, but also because, if I understand his views correctly, he is sympathetic to the broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to ethics represented by Foot.  So, if I understand him correctly, there is a pretty significant amount of common ground between us on this issue.  Now let me explain where I think we differ.  First of all, while there is a sense in which morality might be rationally justifiable if atheism were true, I would say that morality could not be rationally justified if naturalism were true.  The reason is that morality presupposes the existence of what Foot calls “natural goodness,” and natural goodness in turn presupposes the reality of natural teleology, of natural substances being inherently directed toward the realization of certain ends.  And naturalism is simply incompatible with the reality of natural teleology.

To forestall a possible misunderstanding, the reason I say that naturalism and natural teleology are incompatible is not because naturalists deny “intelligent design.”  I am not saying that natural objects are like watches or other artifacts which have functions only insofar as those functions have been imposed by an artificer, so that affirming that they have functions requires affirming an “intelligent designer” of the William Paley or ID theory sort.  That would make the teleology of natural substances extrinsic to them, as the time-telling function of a watch is extrinsic to the metal bits out of which it is made.  From an A-T point of view, that just gets natural teleology fundamentally wrong.  Natural teleology is natural precisely because it is intrinsic to a thing, following from its nature or substantial form.  And you can know the nature of a thing, and thus determine its teleological features, whether or not you believe in God.

(That does not mean that natural teleology does not ultimately entail a divine ordering intelligence.  I think it does.   But the reason why it does -- a reason which Aquinas sets out in his Fifth Way -- is more complicated and less direct than Paley and ID theory suppose.  It has nothing to do with complexity, probability calculations, analogies to artifice, etc.  In my view, ID theory has succeeded only in kicking up a gigantic cloud of dust that has badly obscured the proper understanding of natural teleology and its relationship to natural theology.  I have discussed this issue in a number of blog posts, in chapter 3 of Aquinas, in my Philosophia Christi article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide,” and at greatest length in my Nova et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.”)

The reason is rather that naturalism is committed to the “mechanical world picture” (to use Tim Crane’s apt phrase) that the philosophers and scientists of the 17^th century put at the center of modern Western thought.  Not every element that was originally part of that picture has survived, but the core of it has.  And that core is the idea that there is in the natural order no irreducible teleology of the sort affirmed by Scholastics and other Aristotelians.  All genuine explanations must, on this view, either be non-teleological or, if they make use of teleological notions, still be “cashable” in non-teleological terms. 

Now, if I may digress for a moment: The idea that the natural order is fundamentally non-teleological is often characterized as if it were a finding or result of modern science, but it is not that at all.  It is rather a methodological stipulation about what will be allowed to count as “scientific.”  It’s like the rule against traveling in basketball.  It would be preposterous to argue: “In every basketball game played so far, traveling has not been allowed.  So, the history of basketball gives us overwhelming empirical evidence that there can be no legitimate traveling in basketball.”  That traveling isn’t allowed isn’t some inference we’ve drawn, but rather is just part of the rules of the game.  The reason you don’t see legitimate cases of traveling in actual basketball games is that they’ve been ruled out by fiat from the start.  Similarly, the reason you don’t find explanations in modern science that make use of irreducibly teleological notions is not that “science has shown” that there is no irreducible teleology.  It is rather for the completely trivial reason that appeals to irreducible teleology have been ruled out by fiat as “non-scientific.”

Hence the “argument from science” against irreducible teleology, though often tossed out matter-of-factly as if it were obviously correct -- for instance, by Alex Rosenberg, to take a recent example -- is in fact utterly fallacious.  Whether there is such a thing as irreducible teleology in nature is not a question for empirical science to settle, but rather a question for metaphysics and philosophy of nature.  And as I have argued many times, we cannot make sense either of our own thought processes, or of the irreducible causal powers of different natural substances, or indeed of the very possibility of there being any efficient causation at all, unless we affirm irreducible finality or teleology in nature.  (See e.g. chapter 6 of The Last Superstition, chapter 2 of Aquinas, my article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way,” and chapter 2 of Scholastic Metaphysics.) 

But again, that is a digression, because whether there really is irreducible teleology in nature is something we need not settle for present purposes.  The point for now is just that if there is no irreducible teleology in nature, then there can be no “natural goodness” either and thus no morality.  Here I imagine that Keith would disagree.  I presume -- and Keith, please correct me if I am wrong -- that Keith would say that teleology can be given a naturalistic reduction, perhaps after the fashion suggested by writers like Ruth Millikan.  Hence (the argument would continue) natural goodness, and thus morality, can be given a naturalistic foundation. 

Atheist philosopher and blogger Daniel Fincke has defended a view like this, but as I argued a couple of years ago in a post criticizing his position, it will not work.  To see why not, consider a distinction between kinds of teleology inspired by John Searle’s distinction between intrinsic intentionality, derived intentionality, and as-if intentionality.  Derived intentionality is the sort that the ink marks and sounds we call words have.  The meaning or intentionality of words is real, but in no way intrinsic to the ink marks and sounds themselves.  Instead it derives from the intrinsic or “built-in” intentionality of thought.  As-if intentionality is what is in play when we describe things as if they had intentionality, e.g. when you say of a marble you’ve dropped that it “wants” to roll away.  Of course, it doesn’t really want to roll away, because it is not the sort of thing that can want anything.  As-if intentionality is not really intentionality at all, but just a useful fiction.

Now if there were no intrinsic intentionality (as an eliminative materialist might claim) then there could not be any genuine intentionality at all.  For derived intentionality can exist only if there is intrinsic intentionality from which non-intrinsic intentionality might be derived; and as-if intentionality isn’t real intentionality in the first place. 

But now consider a parallel distinction between intrinsic, derived, and as-if teleology.  Intrinsic teleology would be the sort that Aristotelians attribute to natural substances, an inherent or “built-in” directedness toward an end.  Derived teleology would be a “directedness toward an end” that a thing does not have intrinsically, but only insofar as it is imparted to it by something else.  The purposes of watches and other artifacts would be teleology of this sort.  As-if teleology would be what is in play when we find it useful to describe a thing as if it were directed toward an end. It is not genuine teleology at all, but at most just a convenient fiction. 

Now, the naturalist claims that there is no intrinsic teleology in the sense just described.  That means that all teleology must somehow be either derived or as-if; in particular, a Millikan-style reductionist account of natural teleology would have to say that the teleology of any substance is either derivative from the teleology of something else, or mere as-if teleology.  Yet if there is no intrinsic teleology for things to derive their non-intrinsic teleological features from, then they cannot really coherently be said to have derived teleology.  Their teleology must be mere as-if teleology.  In particular, Millikan-style reductions of teleology in terms of natural selection are really just ways of attributing as-if teleology to biological phenomena. 

But as-if teleology isn’t really teleology at all, any more than as-if intentionality is genuine intentionality.  It is at most merely a convenient fiction.  Accordingly, accounts like Millikan’s don’t really imply that teleology is real but reducible, but rather at best that it is not real, but a useful fiction.  (Searle has made a similar point about views like Millikan’s.)  And in that case you cannot really get natural goodness, and in turn morality, from a naturalistic account of teleology.  The most you can do is argue that it is as if there were teleology in nature, and as if there were goodness in nature, and as if there were such a thing as morality.  But to say it is as if morality existed is, needless to say, not to give a justification of morality.  It is at best a justification for pretending that there is morality.  (And could even the pretense of morality long survive if we all knew it to be mere pretense?  To ask the question is, I think, to answer it.) 

So, even if there is a sense in which atheism is consistent with there being a rational justification of morality, naturalism is not consistent with there being such a justification.  But then, most modern atheists are probably atheists because they are naturalists.  And in that case, their atheism is not consistent with there being a rational justification of morality.  Only a non-naturalistic atheism -- whatever that would look like -- would be consistent with it. 

But even that is true only with qualification.  For I would argue that even intrinsic teleology (and by extension natural goodness and thus morality) is ultimately, when a complete metaphysical analysis of teleology is given, intelligible only in light of classical theism.  The reasons, as I indicated above, are those given in the Fifth Way, properly understood and developed.  (Again, see my book Aquinas and my Nova et Vetera article for the full story.)  There is a parallel here with efficient causality.  You can know that things have causal powers, and what those causal powers are, whether or not you believe in God.  Still, as the Scholastic argues, when a completed metaphysical analysis of causation is carried out, it turns out that a thing could not even for an instant exercise the causal power it has -- the power to actualize potentials -- unless there were a purely actual uncaused cause which continuously imparts to things their causal power.

All that raises lots of questions, of course, but I have already gone a little over the word count.  (Feel free to do the same, Keith!)  Maybe we can return to some of these issues later in this exchange.  (I addressed the relationship between theism and morality in an earlier post a few years ago, and addressed the Euthyphro objection in yet another post.  Interested readers are directed to those posts, but for now I must shut up!)