Tomorrow, France

Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), the chairwoman of the International Affairs Middle East Subcommittee: “Whether or not there is a direct link to the World Trade Center does not mean that Iraq is not meritorious of shedding blood. The common link is that they hate America.” (Source: The Hill, June 17, 2004, http://www.thehill.com/news/061704/finding.aspx.)

Is God a maniac? On Beliefnet, it’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

Beliefnet.com features a column on the issue of placing the Ten Commandments in public buildings. Next to it is a poll question: Should the Ten Commandments be displayed in public buildings?

There’s a place to post comments, and I submitted one pointing out what the biblical God considers capital crimes and appropriate action toward those who stand in his way, and referring to such a God, I thought appropriately, as a homicidal maniac.

The next day my post had disappeared. Thinking this might be due to a technical glitch, I posted it again. Again it disappeared. An exchange of e-mails clarified why: The post was removed to spare the feelings of people who might be offended by use of the phrase “homicidal maniac” in relation to God. The following post was found to be acceptable:

“A more appropriate poll question: The author of the Ten Commandments prescribes the death penalty for murder, blasphemy, false evidence in capital cases, false prophecy, incest, adultery, homosexuality, insubordination to authorities, licentious behavior by a priest's daughter, deceiving one's husband about premarital chastity, raping an engaged woman, insulting one's parents, rebelling against parental authority, publicly profaning the Sabbath, fortune telling, and witchcraft, and also commands the extermination of entire offending peoples, including women and children, Do you believe these moral rules should be displayed in public buildings?”

Speaking of the Ten Commandments, I certainly wouldn’t deny they provide the foundation of U.S. law—after all, the Constitution does expressly forbid the worship of any god but Yahweh, and also enshrines that bedrock principle of American jurisprudence, the prohibition of graven images (except for the clause, ignored by the liberal Supreme Court, exempting the carving of the Ten Commandments).

Any student of history also knows the Greeks and Romans had no concept of law, and that, for example, unless God had enlightened us, natural reason would never have uncovered the desperate civil necessity of prosecuting men who spill their seed.

Absolute Values: Relying on C. S. Lewis; or, Seeking Shelter in House of Straw

The main focus of Do Objective Moral Standards Exist in the World Today?
by Johnson (no first—last?—name) in the Quodlibet Journal (http://www.quodlibet.net/johnson-morality.shtml) is on the shortcomings of moral relativism, the falseness of which, having been proven to the author’s satisfaction, shows that “some form of moral absoluteness” must be true. At least Johnson doesn’t proceed as most apologists do, as if their supposed refutation of relativism proves that their version of absolutism is self-evident.

The author’s major assertion is that “moral relativism is false because one cannot live consistently with a relativistic view of morality.” This an odd claim, especially coming from someone who seems to be a Christian, not many of whom would agree that the difficulty, if not impossibility, of leading the life that Christ preached proves that his teachings are false.

Johnson quotes C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity to support the view that the actual behavior of relativists refutes their professed beliefs:

“Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson.”

It’s a common rhetorical move to attribute imaginary beliefs and actions to an imaginary opponent and then show them to be false or foolish, and conclude as if you’ve said something meaningful about the real beliefs and actions of real people. In this case, Lewis creates an imaginary person, attributes imaginary behavior to him, and claims that all people who have the beliefs Lewis gives to his imaginary person will behave as that fictional person does. How realistic is Lewis’s description of how every promise-breaking relativist behaves when someone breaks a promise to him? In real life, a person who complains about a promise being broken to him isn’t necessarily basing his complaint on a belief that misleading people is morally wrong; it’s possible he doesn’t like being misled because it causes him a psychological or physical harm. By having this imaginary person say, “It’s not fair,” Lewis is trying to lead the reader to conclude that the reason for the fictional complaint about being lied to is moral outrage, when it’s at least possible, and may even be likelier, that in the real world such a complaint would be based on the discomfort of suffering a personal insult or injury. Thus, in real life, a complainer needn’t be revealing—or contradicting—anything about his moral beliefs. Any attempt by us to use the fact that he doesn’t like to suffer to claim he’s revealed his actual moral beliefs, relativist or otherwise, is illegitimate because his avowed aversion to suffering tells us nothing about his attitude toward whether and under what conditions he finds it acceptable that suffering be inflicted on others. The fictional behavior of Lewis’s straw man is based less on reality than the needs of a rather weak rhetorical argument.

Lewis continues:
“A nation may say treaties don’t matter; but then, next minute they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they wanted to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong—in other words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature (absolute standards of right and wrong) just like anyone else.”

(The phrase “just like anyone else” is a deft touch, with the implication that in the realm of morals, there is of course a basic truth—“the Law of Nature”—on which all reasonable people agree, reasonable people being, of course, people who agree with C. S. Lewis; of course.)

A nation is trying to get out of a treaty; first it says treaties don’t matter, and then it says a particular treaty is unfair. The political point it’s trying to make is that no treaty is binding, and even if it this one were, it’s so unfair that breaking it is justified. The latter contention would seem to be bolstering, not spoiling the argument.

Lewis’s triumphant sense that he’s caught his imaginary opponent in a trap is based on two assertions:

1. Saying treaties don’t matter is equivalent to saying there is no such thing as absolute Right and Wrong.
2. Someone who claims something is unfair “really knows” there is such a thing as absolute Right and Wrong.”

Neither proposition is necessarily true.

1. Someone who denies the binding nature of treaties can be acting from an attitude akin to the classic Bolshevik belief that a treaty with an Imperialist nation is not binding because any narrow expediency deriving from such a treaty can be set aside whenever broader ideological interests (i.e., interests based on the principles of a totalizing ideology of which one is absolutely convinced) make it preferable to do so. Thus, such a person, in saying treaties don’t matter, is saying this precisely because he does believe that there is such a thing as an absolute Right and Wrong, one that excuses breaking treaties with an enemy. One might contest the truth of such a person’s ideology, but one can’t deny that he believes there is an absolute Right and Wrong and is basing his actions on it; to say his Right and Wrong aren’t the “Right” Right and Wrong begs the question. In particular, note the ambiguity in Lewis’s characterization of the Law of Nature: Does the Law merely say there are “absolute standards of right and wrong,” or does it say what those standards are? If the latter, whose standards constitute the true Law? Elsewhere, in a further discussion not quoted by Johnson, Lewis characterizes the Law of Nature as “the human idea of decent behavior,” something that is “obvious to anyone.” As usual, Lewis’s claims turn out to be stunningly vacuous, and grounded on little more than his pleased discovery that his values are universally shared by people who agree with him.

2. A nation that claims a treaty is unfair is saying that it believes it’s giving more than it’s getting, but that, for political, economic, or military reasons, it may feel that it has to sign the treaty anyway. Its claim of unfairness can be based wholly on national self-interest, and not on an appeal to a supposed universal standard of justice. Similarly, people demanding to be treated “fairly” can be (and in real life probably mostly are) speaking out of a sense of personal entitlement rather than a sense that a universal moral rule has been broken. In addition, in both cases, it’s possible that someone who complains about being wronged doesn’t believe in absolute values at all, but is trying to gain a strategic advantage by exploiting his opponent’s (or their mutual audience’s) presumed belief in them. Thus, a complaint about not being treated fairly doesn’t mean the complainer “really knows” there are absolutes, it can mean simply that he knows other people think there are.

Both Lewis and Johnson have a few other arguments against relativism, but they add nothing to issues I’ve addressed elsewhere.

Moral Absolutes: Norman Geisler

A. Asserting that “Moral absolutes can be defended by showing the deficiency of moral relativism,” Norman Geisler, in The Absolute Nature of Morality (http://www.shakinandshinin.org/TheAbsoluteNatureOfMorality.html), taken from his 1999 book the Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, offers a series of supposedly decisive criticisms of what he presents as the relativist argument.

1. He begins by offering a seriously incomplete definition of a moral absolute: “An absolute duty is one that is binding on all persons at all times in all places.”
What he conveniently overlooks is that when we speak of a moral commandment as being absolute, we mean, in addition to the criteria he mentions, that it’s objectively valid; otherwise we wouldn’t consider it binding. This omission allows him to skip any explanation of why he thinks he or anyone else is justified in the claim to have such values.

2. “Everything is relative to an absolute. Simply by asking, ‘Relative to what?’ it is easy to see that total relativism is inadequate. It can’t be relative to the relative.”
I can say that relative to the size of the telephone pole, the person standing next to it is small, even though the tallness of a telephone poll is also relative—there are taller things. In any event, when someone says “moral values are relative,” he means “relative to a cultural system,” not “relative to an absolute.” Geisler deliberately or ignorantly misreads the sense of the word “relative” in this context. There’s nothing self-contradictory about saying that what you see is relative to where you stand.

3. “Measurement is impossible without absolutes. Even moral relativists make such statements as, ‘The world is getting better (or worse).’ But it is not possible to know it is getting ‘better’ unless we know what is ‘Best.’ Less than perfect is only measurable against a Perfect. Hence, all objective moral judgments imply an absolute moral standard by which they can be measured.”
Geisler jumbles a number of confusions here. (a) Physical measurements are based on conventionally agreed-on standards, not God-given universal absolutes. As for judgments about nonmaterial issues, I can say I love one person more than I love another, or more today than I did yesterday, without having any notion of what “absolute love” might possibly mean. (b) Anyone claiming to make an objective moral judgment is indeed implying he believes he has an absolute moral standard, but that doesn’t mean he does or prove that such a thing exists. Indeed, it isn’t the relativist, but the absolutist who is implying that there is such a thing as a knowable absolute Perfect or Best, which in the case of moral judgments is just what the absolutist needs to but can’t objectively show to exist. The relativist who says “the world is getting better” isn’t making or claiming to make an objective moral judgment in relation to what is supposedly “Perfect,” just a judgment of whether things are moving in the direction he desires.

4. “Moral disagreements demand objective standards. Real moral disagreements are not possible without an absolute moral standard by which both sides can be measured. Otherwise both sides of every moral dispute are right. But opposites cannot both be right.”
More confusion from Geisler. People can of course disagree in the absence of an absolute standard—in fact, one would expect them to. What he seems to mean is that without such standards, there would be no way to objectively judge between them. Denying such standards, however, isn’t saying that everyone is right; it’s saying that no one can show by objective and absolute means who, if anyone, is. This is not the same as saying they all are, or denying it might be possible, given certain shared assumptions, to distinguish valid from invalid arguments.

5. “Unless there is an objective moral standard by which Hitler’s actions can be weighed, we cannot know that he was evil.”
The assumption here is that of course Hitler was evil, and any system of belief that allows for the possibility of any other judgment is absurd and false. How do we know objectively that Hitler was evil? We could try to invoke God’s laws, but the issue of the absolute nature of God’s laws is precisely what this argument is about, and you can’t invoke their supposed absoluteness as part of an effort to prove their absoluteness. What about invoking, say, a universal consent of humanity or an innate moral sense? Although it may be repugnant to most people to recognize the fact, not all humanity considers or considered Hitler to be evil, and ruling out those people contradicts the sense of what a universal consent or natural instinct is supposed to mean (my earlier essay discusses further the question-begging nature of making a moral view unanimous by declaring people you disagree with ineligible to speak on moral issues). This is not to say that relativists can’t make judgments, including judgments about people whom they acknowledge might make choices different from theirs. Two distinct assertions should not be confused: (a) That relativists can’t make judgments about Hitler’s actions and (b) that relativists can’t make such judgments and claim them to be objective, absolute, and universal. The truth of the second assertion doesn’t entail that of the first. Moreover, making a judgment about Hitler may or may not be a problem for the relativist, depending on how he’s formulated his moral system, but it doesn’t prove his position on the foundations of morality is wrong, merely that it might lead to awkward consequences even within his moral framework. The absolutist’s outrage or triumphal bemusement at any supposed relativist moral quandary is irrelevant to the issue of who is correct about the basis of moral values.

6. “Moral absolutes are unavoidable. Total moral relativism reduces to statements such as ‘You should never say never,’ ‘You should always avoid using always,’ or ‘You absolutely ought not believe in moral absolutes.’ ‘Ought’ statements are moral statements, and ‘ought never’ statements are absolute moral statements. So, there is no way to avoid moral absolutes without affirming a moral absolute. Total moral relativism is self-defeating.”
Rewriting the relativist position so that every statement of the form “You have no absolute basis for your belief” becomes “You ought not to claim you have an absolute basis for your belief” doesn’t turn an epistemological issue about what the absolutist claims to know with absolute certainty (namely, the will of God) into a moral one. It’s an empty rhetorical gimmick.

7. “Relativists confuse fact and value, what is and what ought to be. What people do is subject to change, but what they ought to do is not… Relativists confuse the changing factual situation with changing moral duty.”
Actually, what’s confused is Geisler’s understanding of the relativist argument, the core of which is not that people do different things, but that they disagree about what they claim people ought to do, and there is no objective way to establish that anyone’s views on the latter are absolutely and universally true.

8. “Another important difference… is that between the absolute moral command and the relative way a culture can manifest it. All cultures have some concept of modesty and propriety in greeting. In some a kiss is appropriate, while in others such intimacy would horrify. What should be done is common, but how it should be done differs. Failure to make this distinction misleads many to believe that because a value differs among cultures, the value itself (what) differs.”
Read that last sentence again and see if it makes any more sense the second time. Maybe what he means is that how a value is expressed may differ even if people agree on the value. But if one person says “modesty” means covering your genitals and another says it means “going naked if you wish,” in what sense is their belief in "what should be done" common between them? In fact, as noted in my original essay, this means that the cost of declaring such a value universal is to allow different people to interpret it any way they wish, i.e., to make it relative.

B. Geisler’s positive claims about absolutism are set out in a series of assertions in his article Any Absolutes? Absolutely! (http://www.equip.org/free/DE198.htm):

“The Christian view of right and wrong is neither arbitrary nor groundless. It is not arbitrary because what God wills is in accord with His nature as absolute good. It is not groundless because it is rooted in what never changes, namely, God’s immutable essence… His commands will always be rooted in His immutable nature as the ultimate Good.
…
Since God’s moral character does not change, it follows that moral obligations flowing from His nature are absolute. That is, they are always binding everywhere on everyone.
… even if unbelievers do not have the moral law on their minds , they still have it written on their hearts.
…
[O]nly a Judeo-Christian ethic is universal. That is, it is not only expressed in a particular religious book (the Bible), but it is written on the hearts of all human beings. Hence, no one can rightfully claim the Judeo-Christian concept of ethics is uniquely religious. True, it is held by religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, but the ethic itself is not limited to those religions. It is universally available to all by way of God’s general revelation to humankind.”

Geisler assumes as absolutely true everything he needs to prove: that there is a God, that this God is as described in the Bible and the version of Christian theology Geisler accepts, that Geisler’s interpretation of the Bible and understanding of what he considers the appropriate Christian theology is absolutely correct, that God’s ethic is written in the hearts of all human beings and Geisler knows with absolute certainty what that ethic is and how it should be applied. This is a good example of the emptiness of most believers’ claims about why they think their values are absolute. The general assertion usually comes down to the following form: My values are absolute because they rest on a truth I know is absolute because a text/tradition/teaching tells me so, and I know that that text/tradition/teaching is absolutely true because it tells me that the strength of my faith in it guarantees the truth of what it tells me.

Moral Absolutes: Dennis Prager

In an extensive series of columns (20 parts so far), Dennis Prager (http://www.townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/archive.shtml) expounds on the inadequacy of secularist, i.e., relativist moral views and the superiority of his moral values, which he claims are absolute because they rest on the word of God. To those who would ask which God, his answer is, “the God who revealed His moral will in the Old Testament, which Jews and Christians—and no other people—regard as divine revelation” (Part II). Nowhere in this series does Prager explain why we should accept the beliefs of Jews and Christians—and no other people—as objectively true, beyond his claim that following the rules he supports would lead to the best of all possible worlds (i.e., Prager’s ideal world).

Prager is careful to point out, however, that “One should not confuse Jews or Christians with Judeo-Christian values [sic]. Many Jews and many Christians, including many sincerely religious ones, take certain positions that are contrary to Judeo-Christian values,” which Prager defines as “Old Testament values as mediated by Christians, especially American Christians” (Part XVIII). Actually, what he means is, “as mediated by Dennis Prager.” Again, he offers no objective standards by which he knows that these many sincerely religious souls are misguided and he has the truly absolute values.

Prager asserts that “the Ten Commandments … is a fixed set of God-given moral laws and principles. … The Ten Commandments represents objective, i.e., God-based morality” (Part XI). So in fact we do know what makes a moral law objective: It’s based on God’s word as found and interpreted by Dennis Prager. He doesn’t say how he knows the Ten Commandments are God-based, other than the fact that they claim to be.

Prager deals with the ambiguity in, for example, “Thou shalt not kill” by distinguishing between moral absolutes (“if an act is good or bad, it is good or bad for everyone in the identical situation”) and situational ethics (“allowing situations to determine what is right and wrong,” which he claims does not negate moral absolutes): “An act that is wrong is wrong for everyone in the same situation, but almost no act is wrong in every situation. Sexual intercourse in marriage is sacred; when violently coerced, it is rape. Truth telling is usually right, but if, during World War II, Nazis asked you where a Jewish family was hiding, telling them the truth would have been evil.”

Thus, “it is the situation that determines when killing is wrong… Murder is immoral killing, and it is the situation that determines when killing is immoral and therefore murder… [T]here is moral killing (self-defense, defending other innocents, taking the life of a murderer) and immoral killing (intentional murder of an innocent individual, wars of aggression, terrorism, etc.).” How does Prager know objectively, based on his reading of this commandment, what type of killing is moral and what type is immoral? (My original essay considers these and similar issues more thoroughly). Moreover, if the cost of making a commandment universal is to make it mean different things in different situations, it isn’t universal, regardless of the rhetorical subterfuge one might use in the attempt to disguise the fact.

Prager sums up his attitude toward what makes his moral beliefs objective: “There is good and there is evil independent of personal or societal opinion; and in order to determine what it [sic] is, one must ask, ‘How would God and my God-based text judge this action?’” He doesn’t tell us how to find an answer to this question that doesn’t rely on one’s subjective interpretation of a text one has subjectively decided to accept as God-based. (Calling on a tradition to bail one out here would merely shift and not fundamentally change the dilemma.)

Finally, Prager does notice that religious absolutes don’t always agree: “That different religious people will at times come up with different responses in no way negates the fact that at least they may be pursuing moral truth.” It’s unclear what point Prager is trying to make here with regard to his conviction that his beliefs are absolute and those of believers dissenting from his views are not.

Moral Absolutes: Clarence Thomas et al.

From time to time I’ll be looking at various sites that discuss moral absolutes. Here are the three at the top of Google today.

1. The first is a brief eight-year-old posting from the Apologetics Toolkit (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/a/moral_law.html) entitled Are There Moral Absolutes? It’s more a set of talking points than an extended argument.

The assertions are familiar:

“The vast areas of agreement between moral codes of different societies throughout the ages and throughout the world is [sic] strong evidence that these moral norms were discovered in light of an unchanging and objective set of moral principles that find their source in the realities of human existence.”

I dealt with this sort of claim in my essay posted August 10. Only by carefully sifting through the moral codes of people one judges to be eligible for inclusion and throwing out what one doesn’t accept can one claim to have found “strong evidence” of agreement. The claim is too weak to ground the supposed absoluteness of the values that are left.

“It is precisely its global character which …confirms that there are indeed universal human rights, rooted in the nature of the person, rights which reflect the objective and inviolable demands of a universal moral law. …The universal moral law written on the human heart is precisely that kind of ‘grammar’ which is needed if the world is to engage this discussion of its future.”

This adds nothing to the argument, but does point out at least one aspect of its motivation: Without the assumption of universal moral laws, how could we argue in defense of universal human rights? The high-minded intention doesn’t mean there are in fact such objective laws or rights.

“Prime examples of agreement between manifestations of moral law in different societies are the institutions of marriage and the family. Every society, with a few isolated exceptions, has afforded special protection to the family.”

First, something that has exceptions is not universal. Second, terms like “marriage” and “the family” are broad, Western-based categories adapted by anthropologists in an attempt to bring order to a welter of data on different cultural practices. These practices vary so widely among and even within cultures that this is precisely the sort of evidence one could offer that moral rules are culturally dependent.

“Another example of agreement between [sic] is the institution of religion. No stable society has existed without some provision for the worship of a god or gods.”

Many unstable societies have provided for the worship of a god or gods, so this example proves nothing.

2. The second site reports a speech by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,
The Necessity of Moral Absolutes in a Free Society (http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/article.php?id=180). Moral absolutes are necessary. Tradition tells him what they are. They’re true because they provided the basis for a life he looks back on fondly. Intended as an anecdotal talk, not worth an analytical dissection in the present context.

3. The third site is a brief editorial from the Christian Millennial Fellowship,
Moral Absolutes... What's That?
(http://www.cmfellowship.org/Editorials/moral.htm), which makes a few religious assertions and sprinkles them with mostly irrelevant biblical quotations.