God and Modern Moral Philosophy

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I’m halfway through J. B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. “Modern” in this case doesn’t mean “contemporary”. Philosophers generally consider Rene Descartes to be the founder of modern philosophy and he died in 1650. Schneewind’s book concludes with Immanuel Kant, who died in 1804. (Philosophy isn’t one of those disciplines that leaves the past behind.)

Moral philosophy hasn’t stood still since Kant, but he’s still a very important figure. Kant argued that in order to act ethically, we must subject ourselves to a moral principle (the Categorical Imperative) that we freely and rationally adopt. We must be autonomous agents, not someone else’s followers.

However, as Schneewind tells the story in the first half of The Invention of Autonomy, moral philosophers in the early modern period were deeply concerned with an issue that wasn’t modern at all. Plato presented the problem in one of his early dialogues, Euthyphro: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”. Or, in modern form, “Is the morally good commanded by God because it’s morally good, or is it morally good because it’s commanded by God?”.

Not surprisingly, there were a variety of answers to this question. Some philosophers and theologians argued in favor of “intellectualism”: God commands what is morally good because God recognizes the principles of morality. It isn’t in God’s power or nature to prefer the immoral to the moral. Richard Cumblerland, for example, argued that morality is rational and God is supremely rational. Hence, God’s commands must be the right ones. God cannot make mistakes.

But if God couldn’t have issued different commands, doesn’t that limit God’s power? And doesn’t it mean that morality somehow stands apart from God? It would seem that God might not even be necessary for morality. Concerns like that convinced some to argue for “voluntarism”: God’s commands define morality. God voluntarily chose the morality we have, so what is moral or immoral would have been different if God had chosen differently. Descartes was an extreme voluntarist, for example. Schneewind notes that, according to Descartes,

Eternal verities must depend on God’s will, as a king’s laws do in his country. There are eternal truths, such as that the whole is greater than the part; but they would not be true unless God had willed them to be so [184].

Maybe it made sense for the early modern philosophers to spend so much time trying to figure out what God was thinking, and whether God could have chosen differently, and how morality and God are related. Living in a world subject to the idiosyncratic decisions of kings and queens, it must have been natural to view morality in terms of divine commands.

Eventually, however, the intellectualist side prevailed (to the extent that God remained in the picture at all). It became clear that morality and religion aren’t necessarily connected. All that speculating and arguing about the relationship between God and morality was an enormous waste of time. If you don’t believe me, read the first half of The Invention of Autonomy.

This Editorial Would Have Made a Good Blog Post

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Editorials in the New York Times tend to be rather restrained, befitting the dignified nature of the place (the Times still refers to Vladimir Putin as Mr. Putin and Nancy Pelosi as Ms. Pelosi, for example). But in an editorial called “Center Ring at the Republican Circus”, they’ve finally had enough, adopting a level of scorn and sarcasm befitting angry bloggers everywhere. Good for them!

Quote:

The hottest competition in Washington this week is among House Republicans vying for a seat on the Benghazi kangaroo court, also known as the Select House Committee to Inflate a Tragedy Into a Scandal. Half the House has asked to “serve” on the committee, which is understandable since it’s the perfect opportunity to avoid any real work while waving frantically to right-wing voters stomping their feet in the grandstand.

They won’t pass a serious jobs bill, or raise the minimum wage, or reform immigration, but House Republicans think they can earn their pay for the rest of the year by exposing nonexistent malfeasance on the part of the Obama administration. On Thursday, they voted to create a committee to spend such sums as may be necessary to conduct an investigation of the 2012 attack on the consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The day before, they voted to hold in contempt Lois Lerner, the former Internal Revenue Service official whom they would love to blame for the administration’s crackdown on conservative groups, if only they could prove there was a crackdown, which they can’t, because there wasn’t.

Both actions stem from the same impulse: a need to rouse the most fervent anti-Obama wing of the party and keep it angry enough to deliver its donations and votes to Republicans in the November elections. For a while it seemed as if the Affordable Care Act would perform that role, but Republicans ran into a problem when the country began to realize that it was not destroying American civilization but in fact helping millions of people.

The entire editorial is here.

Nebraska in Black, White and Gray

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Since I recently expressed great disappointment with Gravity, one of the movies nominated for Best Picture last year, it’s only fair that I express great appreciation for one of the others: Nebraska. That’s the one in which Bruce Dern plays a cantankerous, confused old man who thinks he’s won a million dollars from an outfit that’s pushing magazine subscriptions.

It’s an old-fashioned picture, beautifully filmed in black and white, with some wonderful performances, especially by Dern (a healthy 77-year old runner in real life) and June Squibb as his extremely outspoken wife. Their performances were both nominated for Oscars, as were the screenplay, directing and cinematography. 

I had a little problem with the premise of the movie — hadn’t Dern’s character ever gotten one of those “We are authorized to award you one million dollars!” notices in the mail before? And when his wife and sons try to convince him he hasn’t really won anything, don’t they point out the very big “if” in the small print?

Putting that quibble aside, Nebraska is the most consistently enjoyable movie I’ve seen in months. I don’t know how a young person would respond to it (a lot of old people, plus black and white?), but the characters and relationships in the movie resonated with me. My parents didn’t age gracefully, I had an uncle who wouldn’t stay put, and I’m wondering what kind of old man I’m turning into. Contented, grumpy, quiet, outspoken, wise, befuddled? Probably all of the above.

NEBRASKA

And the Lion Shall Lie Down With the Lamb

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Even in this universe, it was probably going to happen sooner or later: our first cat video here at WOCS. My shaky justification is that it’s interesting from a scientific perspective (compare Konrad Lorenz famously showing young geese imprinting on the first moving stimulus they observed, for example, Lorenz’s boots or a toy train). 

Plus, it’s a nice way to spend five and a half minutes:

Historical and literary note: Isaiah 11:6-7 doesn’t actually refer to the lion lying down with the lamb (or the cat lying down with the ducklings):

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling [young animal fattened for slaughter] together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

And while we’re quoting scripture, let’s not forget Ezekiel 16:49:

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom; she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. 

Got that, Congressman Ryan?

Dollars and Poverty

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Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, is worried that the federal government spends too much money trying to help poor people:

“The question isn’t whether the federal government should help; the question is how,” Mr. Ryan said at [a committee] hearing on Wednesday. “How do we make sure that every single taxpayer dollar we spend to reduce poverty is actually working?” 

Can you imagine someone like Ryan ever wanting to make sure that every single dollar spent on the military is actually working? I can’t.

The quote above comes from a New York Times article called “Changed Life of the Poor: Better Off But Far Behind”. The article describes the economic situation facing the poor today: 

Two broad trends account for much of the change in poor families’ consumption over the past generation: federal programs and falling prices.

Since the 1960s, both Republican and Democratic administrations have expanded programs like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit….

As a result, the differences in what poor and middle-class families consume on a day-to-day basis are much smaller than the differences in what they earn.

“There’s just a whole lot more assistance per low-income person than there ever has been,” said … a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That is propping up the living standards to a considerable degree,” he said, citing a number of statistics on housing, nutrition and other categories.

[At the same time], the same global economic trends that have helped drive down the price of most goods also have limited the well-paying industrial jobs once available to a huge swath of working Americans. And the cost of many services crucial to escaping poverty — including education, health care and child care — has soared.

So, for example:

Tammie Hagen-Noey, a 49-year-old living in Richmond, Va., tapped at an iPhone as she sat on the porch of the group home where she lives… She earns $7.25 an hour at a local McDonald’s, and makes a little extra money on the side from planting small plots of land for neighbors….A few months ago, she sold her car for $500 to make rent.

Almost everybody could manage their spending better (even members of Congress) and that woman in Virginia presumably didn’t spend hundreds of dollars to buy the latest iPhone. Human beings get into all kinds of trouble, because of their own mistakes or through no fault of their own, and will continue to need help from the rest of us, even if every single dollar intended to help them doesn’t “work”. Republicans claim that cutting taxes and reducing regulations will create lots of better-paying jobs, allowing us to spend less on government assistance for the poor. What they’re really advocating is a race to the bottom, with more inequality, dangerous workplaces, pollution and unsafe food. Since we have to compete in a global economy, we’ll end up closer to the economic middle in future decades (nobody stays on top forever), but we shouldn’t race to become worse off.