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Divine Attitudes and the Nature of Morality: a Defense of a Theistic Account of Deontic Properties

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Divine Attitudes and the Nature of Morality: a Defense of a Theistic Account of Deontic Properties DIVINE ATTITUDES AND THE NATURE OF MORALITY: A DEFENSE OF A THEISTIC ACCOUNT OF DEONTIC PROPERTIES DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Matthew Carey Jordan, M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 2009 Dissertation Committee: Approved by: Professor Donald C. Hubin, Advisor Professor Justin D'Arms _____________________________________ Professor Daniel Farrell Advisor, Chair Philosophy Graduate Program Copyright by Matthew Carey Jordan 2009 ABSTRACT For philosophers who seek to give an account of the nature of moral properties, an important first step is to identify the platitudes of moral discourse. These platitudes establish the roles that moral properties are thought to play, such that any property that might plausibly be identified with moral wrongness (for example) must be well-suited to fill that role: it should be objective, normative, categorical, authoritative, knowable, and unified. Within the framework of metaphysical naturalism, it is very difficult to find any suitable candidates to play this role. Traditional theism, on the other hand, brings with it conceptual resources that are more than adequate to ground a robust moral realism. Divine commands and divine attitudes are both good candidates to play the role established by moral discourse for moral properties. Contrary to much received philosophical wisdom, metaethical accounts that imply the dependence of moral facts upon theological facts do not face any insuperable difficulties. Worries that theistic metaethical accounts imply a variety of untoward consequences—e.g. that there are nearby possible worlds in which nothing is morally ii wrong, that many substantive moral claims are arbitrarily true if true at all, and that ascriptions of moral qualities to God are redundant or incoherent—can be shown to be unfounded. Thus theistic philosophers have good reason to seek to develop distinctively theistic metaethical accounts. Past accounts of this kind have focused primarily on divine commands. More promising, however, is a divine attitude-based account, according to which moral properties are identical to agent-directed divine attitudes (e.g. an action's moral wrongness consists in its being such that God would be displeased with a person who performs it). This account is able to accommodate many of the subtleties of moral assessment better than a wide range of other moral realisms, both theistic and non-theistic. In particular, the attitude-based account preserves a strong and theoretically desirable link between blameworthiness and wrongdoing. It is superior to divine command theory for a number of reasons, including its ability to preserve the modal status of moral truths and its consonance with an independently plausible and attractive conception of the religious life. iii To Jen iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No one writes a doctoral thesis without incurring a number of intellectual and personal debts, and I suspect that the debts I have incurred are more substantial than most. Encouragement and support—emotional and financial as well as intellectual—has come from many quarters. I am grateful for all of it. In particular, I wish to thank Sigrún Svavarsdóttir, who encouraged me to approach my dissertation project from a distinctively theistic perspective and without whom the project never would have gotten off the ground. I am also especially grateful to my advisor, Don Hubin, both for his willingness to oversee this project and for helpful feedback throughout the writing process. Conversations with Steve Brown have improved the quality of the dissertation as well as the quality of my life. Feedback from Justin D'Arms, Dan Farrell, and Stewart Shapiro has helped me to clarify and refine various parts of what follows. Ancestors of portions of this dissertation were presented at the 2007 Eastern Regional Meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers, the 2008 Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, and the spring 2009 OSU Philosophy Department dissertation seminar; I am grateful to members of all three v audiences, especially Salvatore Florio and Timmy Fuller, for questions and comments that have helped me to think through a number of important issues. I also appreciate the support of the Capital University Department of Religion and Philosophy, especially Wray Bryant and Tom Christenson. I am indebted to the entire philosophy faculty at Talbot School of Theology for modeling what it means to ‚think Christianly‛ about philosophical issues, and especially to Garry DeWeese and Doug Geivett for encouraging me to press on in the face of adversity. Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to thank a number of persons outside the world of professional philosophy whose support has been invaluable to me. I am grateful to my parents, David and Anne Jordan, for endorsing my decision to pursue graduate education in philosophy rather than getting a real job. Their generous financial support has made the last few years much more comfortable than they otherwise might have been. Pastors John Chase and Mike Roddy, along with the rest of the Logos community, have been sources of tremendous encouragement through the years. Their friendship and financial support have meant more to me than they know. I am especially grateful to Mike and the guys who built me the attic office where much of this dissertation was written. Above all, I am thankful to and for my children—David, Danny, Addie, and John—and my remarkable wife, Jen. Without her support this project could not have been completed, and it is to her that this work is dedicated. vi VITA July 26, 1977. Born – Cleveland, Ohio 1999. B. A. Philosophy, Ohio University 2003. M. A. Philosophy, Biola University 2003 – present . Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University PUBLICATIONS 1. M. Jordan, Review of Moral Fictionalism, by Mark Eli Kalderon, Philosophia Christi 10, No. 2 (2008): 480—83. 2. M. Jordan, ‚Locke on ‘Substance in General’,‛ Sorites 20 (March 2008): 8—26. 3. M. Jordan, ‚Reid against the Way of Ideas: A Review Essay on Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology,‛ Philosophia Christi 6, No. 1 (2004) 121—27. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Philosophy vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract. .ii Dedication. iv Acknowledgements. .v Vita. .vii Chapters: Introduction. 1 Chapter 1: The Problem(s) with Nontheistic Moral Realisms. .9 1.1 Some Metaethical Desiderata . 14 1.2 Theistic Strategies for Accommodating the Desiderata . 23 1.3 Nontheistic Moral Realisms and the Desiderata . 43 1.3.1 Peter Railton's Reductive Naturalism . 45 1.3.2 Frank Jackson's Analytical Descriptivism . .59 1.3.3 Christine Korsgaard's Kantianism . 69 Chapter 2: Theistic Ethics: Not as Bad as You Think . .78 2.1 The Dependence Thesis . .79 2.2 The Karamazov Problem . 84 2.3 The Arbitrariness Objection . .97 2.4 The Divine Ascription Problem . .104 Chapter 3: Divine Attitude Theory: Neither Impossible nor Implausible . 112 3.1 Can We Say Anything about God? . .117 3.2 An Unsurpassable Passable Being . 131 Chapter 4: Epistemological Worries about Divine Attitude Theory . 141 4.1 General Worries . .142 4.2 Adams's Challenge . .146 viii Chapter 5: Divine Attitudes or Divine Commands? . 159 5.1 Moral Supervenience and Moral Necessity . .161 5.2 Divine Commands in the Best Possible World . 173 5.3 A Difficulty with Divine Commands . .177 5.4 The Moral Life: Uncodifiability and Judgment . .183 5.5 The Religious Life: Intimacy with God . 192 Bibliography . 195 ix INTRODUCTION The relationship between religion and morality is a topic of perennial philosophical interest. My own initial exposure to the subject came through reading J. L. Mackie's famous essay ‚On the Subjectivity of Values‛ as an undergraduate. In that essay, Mackie assumes the truth of metaphysical naturalism and argues that he and his fellow naturalists ought to be ethical non-realists. Specifically, Mackie defends a moral error theory, maintaining that the language of morality is truth-apt but that moral judgments of all kinds are systematically false. He seems to take it for granted that theists are in a much different position than naturalists with respect to these issues; he indicates that the problems that arise for naturalistic attempts to develop realistic moral theories do not arise for philosophers who embrace the existence of Platonic forms or for theists.1 In the decades since Mackie published his essay, many philosophers have become convinced that he was mistaken. Mackie's central argument against naturalistic moral realism assumes, implausibly, a very strong thesis of motivational internalism. If 1 See (Mackie 1977, 118). 1 we reject this thesis, the prospects for developing a plausible naturalistic version of moral realism quickly become much brighter. Or so the thinking goes. My own view is that Mackie's fundamental intuition is sound. It was a mistake for him to build his case for moral error theory on the foundation of motivational internalism, but he was right to believe that the prospects for developing a robust moral realism that is compatible with metaphysical naturalism are not good. In Chapter 1, ‚The Problem(s) with Nontheistic Moral Realisms,‛ I defend this claim. I argue that any metaethical account that can properly be referred to as a version of moral realism must be able to satisfy a number of core metaethical desiderata. These desiderata are established via an examination of some of the platitudes of moral discourse, patterns
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