PhilosophicalArguments

A Guide for Students at AQA AS Level

By Dr Paul E. HillContents

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© 2004 Dr Paul E. Hill

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Contents

Introduction 3

Logic and Argument 4

The Theory of Knowledge 9The Structure of the Module 10Empiricism and Rationalism 11Knowledge and Justification 14Knowledge and Scepticism 16Knowledge of the External World 20

Moral Philosophy 28 The Structure of the Module 29

Normative Ethics 30Utilitarianism 36Deontology 40Virtue Ethics 43

Practical Ethics 48Abortion 48Voluntary Euthanasia 56

Meta-Ethics 60

The Philosophy of Religion 67 Some Preliminary Discussion 68 Ideas of God and Religious Language 70

Arguments for the Existence of God 73The Cosmological Argument 73The Ontological Argument 77The Teleological Argument 79

Faith, Reason and Belief 82 Religious Experience 82

Is Faith Rational? 84 Is Religious Belief Basic? 86 The Implications of God’s Existence 87

God and the Problem of Evil 87Miracles 91God and Morality 94

Some Interesting Passages 97

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Introduction contents

This book is written primarily for students who are taking the AQA AS level course in philosophy. It covers the modules concerning Theory of Knowledge, Moral Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion. Some of the material on God and Moral Philosophy will also be of use to students taking other courses in which the topics are covered and to A Level Religious Studies students whose courses include some Philosophy of Religion and Ethics.

A problem faced by students lies in the fact that core philosophical arguments are very often buried in discursive text. Though it is necessary to have access to these arguments, they can be very difficult to discern. The purpose of this book is to make the most important arguments explicit, to spell them out, and to do so in a way which enables the student to understand exactly what is being argued. This done, the path is then laid out whereby the student may intelligibly comment on the validity and soundness of the argument. The material could be used either by the tutor for class discussion and teaching or as a source book for individual work by students.

There are no conventional chapters. Instead, the book is divided into sections, each one dealing with one of the above modules. At the beginning of each section there is a summary of the structure of the module. This is followed by a preliminary discussion. This is designed to stimulate students into thinking for themselves about the issues focussed on in the text that follows. The central ideas and concepts involved in that module are then discussed. There follow the main arguments relevant to the topic, an explanation of each part of the argument (where necessary) and a series of responses. Finally, there are questions and points for further discussion. Often they deal further with possible responses to the arguments and positions presented. These points the tutor or student may use as is required but I would like to think that they will be used. I have tried to make them matters for thought not mere recall. Because the concepts of validity, soundness and other related logical notions are of central importance, there is a separate section, at the beginning of the book, which deals with these issues.

Note, that although some essential background information is given (both to the content of the modules and the individual arguments) this book is not intended as yet another general textbook on philosophy. Excellent material of that sort already exists. Rather, this is intended to be a resource book of philosophical arguments. Further, the background material to the modules is intended as a summary or series of reminders of what has been taught more fully in class or read with greater thoroughness elsewhere, rather than as a beginners guide itself. Finally, I have not included every idea, theory, argument that is covered in the course. I have restricted myself to the inner core of the course material. This book, them, is best regarded as a supplement to a more thorough general guide or textbook.

AcknowledgementsFull references of quoted sources are given on the page on which they are cited. A writer owes many debts. I have benefited from reading Christopher Hamilton’s excellent AQA AS level philosophy textbook Understanding Philosophy (Cheltenham, Nelson Thornes, 2003). In the section on practical ethics I draw upon certain aspects of discussion in Jonathan Glover’s Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977). The section on Virtue Ethics draws on much I have learned on a recent Open University course on the subject: A432 Applying Virtue Ethics. In my discussion on Moral Realism, I have benefited from reading Thomas Nagel’s, A View From Nowhere (Oxford, OUP, 1986). Much of the material has been adapted from teaching notes used in courses I have taught on an extra-mural basis.

The AuthorPaul Hill has been a schoolteacher all his professional life. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Nottingham and has taught extra-mural classes on all the topics covered in this book for the WEA and The University of Hull.

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LogicAnd

Argument

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Logic and Argument contents

Essential Concepts and IdeasWhen people argue we often find much use of such expressions as ‘that’s a valid point’, ‘that’s a fallacy’, ‘that’s a true argument’, that’s logical (or illogical)’, and so on. In Logic the words ‘valid’, ‘invalid’, ‘true’, ‘false’, ‘logical’, as well as a host of others have precise meanings. In philosophical contexts at least, stick to them.

ArgumentIn philosophy an argument is not a (perhaps unpleasant) disagreement. (Though disagreements, unpleasant or otherwise, can and do emerge amongst those who hold to conflicting arguments.) An argument is a sequence of reasoning in which one proceeds from certain starting points (called Premises) and reaches (by logical means) a finishing point (called a Conclusion).

Following From / EntailmentIf the argument is a good one, the conclusion is said to follow from the premises. (Alternatively we may say that the premises entail the conclusion.) Take the following argument:

Argument A1. All men are mortal2. Socrates is a man3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal

(1) and (2) are the Premises of this argument and (3) is the Conclusion. The argument is a good one because the conclusion follows from the premises. Now take the following argument:

Argument B1. All men are mortal2. Socrates is a man3. Therefore, Socrates drinks wine

This argument is no good, even though the conclusion is (no doubt) still true. This is because the conclusion does not follow from the premises.

Valid and InvalidArgument A is said to be valid because the conclusion follows from the premises. Argument B is said to be invalid because the conclusion does not follow from the premises. This distinction is important. In a valid argument, the truth of the conclusion follows from the truth of the premises. This means that the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true.

Truth ValuesLogicians talk about truth-values. There are two truth-values – True (T) and False (F). Valid arguments are said to preserve truth-value. If the premises are T, the conclusion must be T. You can see that in Argument A, if the premises are both T, the conclusion must be T also. In Argument B, in contrast, though the conclusion may well be true, the truth of the premises does not guarantee its truth. The two premises would still be true even if the conclusion were false. Now take Argument C.

Argument C1. All men are immortal2. Socrates is a man3. Therefore, Socrates is immortal

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You may be puzzled if asked whether this argument is valid or invalid. In fact it is valid. It passes the test. The conclusion follows from the premises. If the premises were true, so must the conclusion be. Of course, one of the premises is false but note, the truth value, in this case F, is still preserved: one of the premises is false and, because the argument is valid (the conclusion follows from the premises) so must the conclusion be false.

This is important. You may be dealing with a valid argument but that is no guarantee that your premises are true. If you do not like where an opponent’s argument is leading, there are two possible ways of showing the argument to be unreliable. You can try to show that your opponent’s argument is invalid or try to show that one of his premises is false. (It may, of course, suffer from both defects.) However, if you agree that the premises are true and the argument is valid, you must accept the truth of the conclusion – on pain of plain irrationality.

Do not get mixed up between truth and falsehood on the one hand and validity and invalidity on the other. The words ‘true’ and ‘false’ apply to the individual statements or propositions in an argument; the words ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ apply to the arguments as a whole. You cannot make ‘a valid point’ (however many times you hear it said) and you cannot have ‘a true (or false) argument’. A valid argument with true premises is the kind of argument we should aim for. Such an argument is said to be sound. It is one you can thoroughly rely on.

Refute and DenyThere was once an interchange between a labour and a conservative MP in the House of Commons in which the one accused the other of supporting a policy which would have this or that undesirable consequence. The other stood up and, with no nonsense, said, ‘I refute that entirely’, and promptly sat down in silent high dudgeon. Under the strict terms of the philosophical act, he had refuted nothing. To refute means to disprove someone’s argument, it does not mean just ‘deny’. If Inspector Morse, showing off his logical acumen, uses argument to show that I must be the murderer, and I show, by counter-argument, that I could not have even been at the scene, I have refuted Morse – credit to me indeed. If, like the TV criminal I say, ‘I was at ’ome guvner, with the missus’, I have merely denied the charge. This impresses the police a good deal less. Philosophers too. To refute an argument is hard work; sticking one’s back to the wall and shouting is quite easy. (I do though note that my dictionary allows ‘refute’ to mean (loosely) to deny. I note it with sadness. It has all the air, as dictionaries now do, of accommodating linguistic sheer bone-idleness and crowning it as ‘the evolution of the language’. Say what you like elsewhere but be more careful when engaging in philosophy.)

Different Forms of Valid ArgumentThere are different forms of valid argument. Take the following:

Argument DIf it has snowed, the buildings will be whiteIt has snowedTherefore, the buildings will be white

We could refer to the individual propositions here with symbols: ‘P’ for ‘If it has snowed’ and ‘Q’ for ‘The buildings will be white. We can then see that the argument has the form:

Argument EIf P, then QPTherefore Q

This is a valid form of argument. Any argument – regardless of the truth of the Ps and Qs – which has this form would be valid (providing the P and the Q in any one argument do not

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vary). It says that ‘If P is true, Q will be, goes on to say that P is, indeed, true, and arrives at the conclusion that Q is true’.

Still thinking of P and Q the same way, is the following argument valid?

Argument FIf P then QQTherefore P

No. The conclusion, though it may well be true, doesn’t follow from the premises. It could be that if it had snowed the buildings would be white. It could indeed be that the buildings are white, but this might have been due to workmen having painted them that colour.

Arguments of this form are invalid.

How about:

Argument GIf P then QNot QTherefore not P

Yes. If it had been snowing, the buildings would indeed be white. Given that they aren’t white, how could it have been snowing?

(How could all this accommodate the fact that snow often doesn’t settle?)

Now take:

Argument HIf P then QNot PTherefore not Q

No. Snow is not the only possible cause of white buildings. Remember the paint.

In the ‘If P, then Q’ premises both P and Q appear. The ‘P’ (the part following ‘If’) is called the antecedent and the ‘Q’ (the part following the ‘then’) is called the consequent. In the second premise of Argument F we are said to be ‘affirming the consequent’ and in the second premise of Argument H we are said to be ‘denying the antecedent’. Both are fallacies – invalid forms of reasoning. Arguments E and G are valid: their conclusions do follow from their premises. They are common forms of argument and each has its own names. Argument E is called ‘modus ponens’; Argument G, ‘modus tollens’. Be careful though. It is hardly fallacious just to deny the antecedent or to affirm the consequent. We may well have good reason to do so. The fallacious bit is in the reasoning we have done based on doing these things.

All this can lead to some odd seeming results. Take the following:

If Henry VIII was once King of England, then triangles have 3 sides.

Put it in the form of an argument:

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Argument IHenry VIII was once King of EnglandTherefore, triangles have three sides

This is a valid argument. This is simply because it would be self-contradictory to affirm the premise and yet deny the conclusion. Can you see why? In fact, the premise is neither here nor there; it would be self-contradictory to deny the conclusion all on its own because it is a necessarily true statement. It is necessary because triangles just must have three sides – they wouldn’t be triangles with any other number of sides. It is impossible both to affirm the premise and deny the conclusion simply because it is impossible to deny (in this case) the conclusion. In fact this makes any statement whatsoever imply a necessary truth. Whatever the premise, if the conclusion is a necessary truth, then the premise must imply the conclusion because it would be impossible for the premise to be true and conclusion to be false. That is so simply because it would be impossible for the conclusion to be false anyhow.

Now look at this:

Argument JA triangle has four sidesTherefore beer is made from malted barley

This too is valid. Again this is because it is self-contradictory to affirm the premise and yet deny the conclusion. You should be able by now to spot why: it is just because it is self-contradictory (in this case) to affirm the premise. This, in turn, is because the premise is necessarily false and it is self-contradictory to affirm a necessarily false statement. In fact a necessarily false statement implies any other statement whatsoever. The argument will be valid whatever the conclusion. Indeed, the conclusion, in a sense, drops out of the picture.

NoteThe expression ‘iff’ is used in several arguments in this book. This is not a mis-print. ‘iff’ is logical shorthand for ‘if and only if’

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The Theory

OfKnowledge

(Epistemology)

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The Theory of Knowledge (Epistemology) contents

The Structure of the ModuleIn philosophy, the theory of knowledge deals with the questions of what kinds of things we can know and how we know them. There are four main issues:

1) The source of knowledge: Do we get knowledge by experience or by reason, or by a combination of these things? Central here is the debate between ‘Rationalism’ and ‘Empiricism’ and the distinction between A Priori and A Posteriori knowledge.

2) The Justification of Knowledge: The difference between belief and knowledge. Evidence and degrees of justification. The tripartite definition of knowledge and its limits. Reliabilism, Foundationalism and Coherence as grounds for justification.

3) Knowledge and Scepticism: How far can doubt extend? Is ‘Global Scepticism’ possible? How scepticism can arise from illusion, dreaming and deception.

4) Knowledge of the External World: Do we experience the external world directly or is it mediated? There are three important doctrines: Realism, Idealism and Phenomenalism.

Some Preliminary DiscussionWe all feel knowledge to be an important part of our lives. To have knowledge seems, in a very real way, to have power. If you know what is going on in a situation, you may be able to influence it a bit more, or if that isn’t possible, you may be in a better position to watch your own step and avoid catastrophe. Scientific knowledge is clearly important for the technological powers that it confers upon us. But there’s more to it than all this. We often simply take joy in knowing things, in having a really good understanding of something, and even when there are things we know and don’t like, we would still (often) rather know than not. Ignorance isn’t really bliss.

Of course, only a bombastic fool would not admit to the depth of their own personal ignorance and only extreme arrogance on the part of mankind in general would lead us to believe that there couldn’t be far more to the world than we presently understand or, perhaps, ever will (or even can) understand.

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Empiricism and Rationalism

Essential Concepts and Ideas

A Posteriori and A PrioriThis is a distinction between two different kinds of propositions. Its connection with knowledge lies in the ways in which propositions can be known.

A posteriori propositions can be known to be true or false only on the basis of experience or observation.A Priori propositions can be known to be true or false independently of experience or observation.

This distinction forms one of the most controversial aspects of epistemology. Finding statements that are a posteriori is easy. (e.g. ‘Cake is fattening’, ‘There is life on Mars’.) Clearly, only observation can establish whether these statements are true or false. What falls under the category of a priori (if anything) is far more problematic. Mathematics and logic are two areas which have been held to be sources of a priori knowledge. (e.g., ‘Triangles have three sides’, ‘2+3=5’) Those who hold that these statements are a priori hold that there is nothing in experience, nothing in what we observe, that makes them true or justifies our counting them as instances of knowledge. Look at raindrops falling down a window. If two drops and three drops eventually collide and form one bigger drop, we do not thereby take our observation to falsify ‘2+3=5’. In contrast, we would certainly take a complete lack of any sightings of life on Mars, after an exhaustive search, to count against the truth of ‘There is life on Mars’.

Analytic and SyntheticA further distinction between propositions.

A proposition is analytic if, as Kant put it, the concept of the predicate is contained in the concept of the subject. Take, ‘Triangles are three sided figures’. This is normally taken as being analytic because ‘triangle’ just means ‘three sided figure’. Figures that did not have three sides just wouldn’t count as triangles by definition. Thus, to say that triangles have three sides cannot count as an instance of substantive knowledge – it’s a definition.

A synthetic proposition is one that is not analytic.

Necessary and Contingent TruthsA distinction associated with the first two.

A necessary truth is one that could not possibly be false. Again ‘A triangle has three sides’ is a good example. We cannot imagine any possible world in which this proposition could be false. (We can imagine a world in which figures with a different number of sides were called triangles, but they would not be triangles as we understand them. There is no possible world in which triangles as we understand the term have anything other than three sides.)

A contingent truth is one that could be false if the world were different. In the actual world the proposition ‘Cheese is fattening’ is, unfortunately, true. We can, however, imagine a possible world in which it was not true, even if the laws of nature would have to bequite different.

ConceptsThere is no philosophically neutral way of defining ‘concept’. Do not use the word as a fancy alternative for ‘idea’, ‘theory’ or ‘proposition’. Leave that to the linguistic vandals who populate the media. Ideas, for instance, are, in some sense, things in the mind. Concepts are things we all share. The best way to understand the term is to see it as a component of

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understanding. To have a concept of X (a house, an elephant, snow, a philosophy tutorial) is to be able to recognise X-things as such and be able to distinguish them from other things. Thus, if you can tell a house when you see one, realise they are for living in, distinguish it from bungalows, flats and hotels, etc, then you can be said to have the concept of house. Things are said to fall under concepts. The dwelling in which I live falls under the concept of house (as well as the concept of dwelling). Concepts can be of concrete things (mental and physical items) or abstract things (the number three). Concepts are said to be instantiated if there exists at least one thing which falls under it. Thus, the concept of house is instantiated; the concept of unicorn is not.

Empiricism and Rationalism These are philosophical doctrines concerning the source and justification of our knowledge. Empiricism holds that sense experience is what justifies our claims to knowledge and grounds our grasp of concepts. It denies that there is any knowledge available to us that has a different source. It tends to regard the mind as starting out as a kind of empty sheet upon which experience imprints its contents. By means of association between these contents, knowledge of the world is founded. Empiricists play down a priori knowledge, often claiming that it is not substantial. A priori propositions are held to be analytic and necessary. They are definitions or tautologies not expressions of true knowledge. Empiricism also provides an account of concepts. All concepts derive from experience. A notion important to empiricists is that of sense data. A sense datum is a kind of atom of sense experience. (The experience of a patch of colour in one’s visual field, for instance.) In its extremes, empiricism has held that what we ordinarily think of as objects in the world are really only collections of such sense data. The empiricist eschews great metaphysical systems, in which the nature of reality can be deduced from first principle by the exercise of reason alone.

One problem lies in giving an account of how our experience can be organised if all we get is a series of disorganised sense experiences. How could we even begin? Themind seems at least to provide some categories by which experience can sort itscontents. A second problem lies in giving an account which avoids the sceptical conclusionthat all I can ever really know are the contents of my own experience. (We encounter some sceptical arguments in what follows.) A third problem lies in accounting for knowledge that does not seem to have its sources

of justification in experience. (Mathematics, for instance, or the laws of logic. It is true that we need experience to learn Mathematics but it is far from clear that it is (or even can be) anything in experience which makes a mathematical statement true.) A fourth problem is that of showing that observation itself is entirely free of notions which are non-empirical. (For example, in observation we often count things, but are our number concepts themselves derived from experience?) A fifth problem lies in giving an account of theory and its role in observation. (For example, a physicist may take an observation of a streak in a cloud chamber as an observation of a collision of atomic particles. But we cannot see atomic particles, so how are we to justify saying we observe collisions between them?) In general, what we take to be observations (especially in science) depends on our acceptance of whole bodies of theory in which the notion of experience is problematic. Empiricists have addressed these problems with vigour. (See, for example, Russell and Ayer) but their solutions are not generally favoured.

Rationalism holds that reason alone can provide us with and justify claims to knowledge. The debate between Empiricists and Rationalists is most strongly associated with the conflicting philosophies of Britain (Locke, Berkeley and Hume) and the continent (Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Since then, the picture has become more complicated. Earlier rationalists thought it possible to arrive at the true nature of reality by deduction from first principles. They stressed that much knowledge is a priori. Nowadays, more moderately, there are many who think that the mind comes with established categories

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by which experience is sorted (at least to a point). There is also the idea that our ability to acquire our first natural language requires some built-in mental structures. All this is rationalism of a sort. (Note: the term is also used to cover those who favour reason over authority but this is not what is intended in the epistemological context.)

The Tripartite DistinctionFoundationalism: This is the view that knowledge has firm foundations. Upon these basic foundations, all the rest of knowledge is built or finds its justification. The motive for this is that without such foundations we seem to embark on an infinite regress. In asking what justifies our belief that one thing is the case, we appeal to something else. But then if we ask what justifies that we have to appeal to yet something more fundamental. Without some firm place to stop, our knowledge seems to be like a house built on sand, which in turn rests on air, in its turn resting on water, and so on. Try this: take something you take yourself to know and ask what your grounds are for claiming that you know it. Do you, can you stop somewhere? We need to find our firm foundations. About these foundations one would have to be certain. They need to lie beyond any conceivable doubt. The trick lies in finding them. Empiricists find that place in the contents of our sense experience; rationalists find it in first principles. Both strategies have proved to be problematic. For one thing, our conception of the world seems to go well beyond anything our senses alone can deliver or justify. As for first principles – which ones?

Reliablism: The view that what justifies claims to knowledge is that one arrives at one’s knowledge by means of a reliable process. But what constitutes a reliable procedure? It may be rational to say that physics gives us reliable procedures for arriving at knowledge and reading tea-leaves or the entrails of goats does not. But saying exactly why is not easy.

Coherence: The view that what justifies any claim to know is that the item under review makes our whole conception of the world more coherent than it would be without it. We may, of course, argue endlessly about just which beliefs do make the whole picture more coherent.

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Knowledge and Justification

Believing and KnowingArgument 1

Essential Concepts and IdeasIn general the difference between believing and knowing is that one’s beliefs can turn out to be false but one cannot be said to know something which is false, even if one thinks one knows it. For example, though some people believe the world to be flat, they cannot know it, for it is not flat. Truth is built into our concept of knowledge. To say that we know that p is to imply that p is true. If we genuinely thought we knew something and it later turned out to be false, then we didn’t really know it to begin with, we just (very firmly) believed it. (Note: in what follows we will be concerned with ‘knowing that’ not ‘knowing how’.)

How does knowledge relate to belief? For long enough it was generally thought that knowledge could be defined as justified, true belief (JTB). Under this conception of knowledge, I am entitled to say that I know, for example, that the moon is (approximately) 250,000 miles from the earth if a) I believe that it is, b) my belief is justified (leaving aside for the moment the question as to what justifies it) and c) if it is true. In short, being JTB was thought sufficient for knowledge. Then, in 1963, came a bombshell. We can express it thus:

Argument 11. JTB is sufficient for knowledge if and only if no counter-examples can be found.2. Counter-examples can be found3. Therefore, JTB cannot be sufficient for knowledge

ExplanationThe argument is valid. The conclusion at line 3 follows from the premises at lines 1 and 2 but why accept these premises? Line 1 simply sets out what it means to say that something is sufficient. It means you don’t need anything else. If you’ve got JTB, you’ve got knowledge. Line 2 says there are counter-examples. In other words, you can have JTB which is not knowledge. This means that something else is needed. If something more than JTB is needed for knowledge then JTB cannot be sufficient for knowledge.

If being a dwelling place with just one floor is to function as a definition of a bungalow then finding a dwelling place with just one floor must be sufficient for its counting as a bungalow. If you come across something which is a dwelling place with just one floor but is not a bungalow (you might think a flat also fits the bill) then some extra condition must be needed in order to count something as a bungalow.

Why, though, accept Line 2? In 1963, an American philosopher Edmund Gettier came up with some counter-examples, thus showing that JTB was not sufficient for knowledge. Here is a simple instance.

I see a man, a complete stranger, take a drink and believe on this basis that he is a whisky drinker.I am justified in this belief. (The glass is a whisky glass, I saw the man pour the liquid from the bottle into the glass, the bottle is labelled ‘Finest Scotch Whisky’, he is singing ‘I belong to Glasgow’, I am sitting in a Glaswegian pub, his friends are saying ‘Are you enjoying that whisky, Jock?’ and so on.)It is true that the man is a whisky drinker.But, on this occasion, the man just happened to be drinking brandy (which had been substituted in the bottle).

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The charge is that I could not reasonably be said to know in this case that the man is a whisky drinker. Yet I do have a belief which is justified and true (JTB). It does not matter that examples like this are unlikely or odd. The point is that I can have JTB which is not knowledge. Some other ingredient must be necessary for something to count as knowledge.

Another example (adapted from ‘The Oxford Companion to Philosophy’):

My clock registers one o’clock and I believe that to be the time.I am justified in believing this because my clock is normally accurate.It is true that it is one o’clock.

The clock, however, is broken. I consult it when it just happens to be one o’clock. So, I do not know that it is one o’clock.

ResponsesGettier’s proof has been accepted. JTB may be necessary for knowledge but it isn’t sufficient. The response, therefore, has been focussed on trying to find the extra necessary ingredient. If we refer to the extra necessary ingredient with an ‘X’, then perhaps we could say that knowledge is JTBX, or that JTBX is sufficient for knowledge.

But what could the extra necessary ingredient X be? The Gettier cases provide a clue. In Gettier cases, the reason we do not intuitively wish to say there is knowledge seems to lie in the fact that the justification doesn’t relate in the right way to the truth of what is believed. In our example, I am justified in my belief and my belief is also true, but the truth of my belief is only accidentally related to the evidence I have. So, perhaps the extra ingredient has to be that the truth of one’s belief has to relate to the evidence in a non-accidental or non-coincidental way. Gettier’s paper stimulated a lengthy debate about the extra necessary ingredient. As soon as one philosopher thought it had been found, another came up with an ingenious counter-example to that. The main importance of such findings is that we should always be aware of the difficulties of relying on simple definitions of problematic concepts.

One could, of course, say that knowledge is JTB, just so long as the justification was perfect and complete. However, since one never has access to justifications of this sort, this would preserve the definition only at the cost of our never having any knowledge – hardly a helpful conclusion. Nonetheless, philosophers have questioned exactly what can be known. (See the next section on ‘Knowledge and Scepticism’.

Points for Discussion

1. Can you construct your own Gettier examples?

2. What would make the truth of one’s belief be related non-accidentally or non-coincidentally to one’s belief?

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Knowledge and Scepticism

Sceptical ArgumentsArgument 2

Essential Concepts and IdeasTo be sceptical is to display doubt. All of us are sceptical about certain things. We may, for example, doubt that the policies of a political party will really solve the problems of, say, education or the health service. We may be sceptical about someone’s chances of getting a job. What makes it reasonable to be sceptical about something is that we think that there is insufficient justification to believe it.

Often we take the evidence of our senses to provide a justification for our beliefs. Sometimes this has to backed-up by more scientifically based evidence. For many of us, taking the word of a reliable authority on difficult technical matters provides us with sufficient justification. If, for example, I go to the doctor and present certain symptoms and the doctor tells me that I have such and such a condition, I would normally take myself to be justified in my belief that I have that condition. Nonetheless, we may still ask whether these ordinary justifications are good enough. When we really try to doubt things it is breathtaking how far we can go. How far can our doubts reasonably extend? How much justification do we need to make a belief reasonable? Throughout the history of philosophy, many philosophers have seemed to take their doubts to extremes. The French philosopher Rene Descartes, for example, doubted away most of what we ordinarily think of as knowledge – especially knowledge of the world that comes to us through our senses. It is scepticism about the deliverances of the senses that will be the focus in what follows.

Perceptual beliefs (PBs): beliefs we have which are based on perception (e.g. believing that there is an apple in the fruit bowl as a result of seeing it to be there).

Possibility: There are different kinds of possibility and impossibility. First we have technological possibility. This concerns what we have the technology to do. Building flying machines is technologically possible. (Indeed, we actually build them, so it must be possible to do so.) Building time machines is not. Then we have physical (or empirical) possibility. It is physically possible that we could fly to Pluto; it may well not be physically possible to build a time machine. It is physically impossible for man to breath unaided underwater or to accelerate a material object to the speed of light. Something may be technologically impossible but physically possible. For example, it is physically possible that we can fly between the stars but not (yet) technologically possible. To say that a thing is physically possible is simply to say that it is permissible within the laws of nature, even if it never actually happens or we will never be able to do it. If something is physically impossible it never will be technologically possible. Then we have logical possibility. To say that a proposal is logically possible is simply to say that the proposal is not logically self-contradictory. If something is self-contradictory, then it is logically impossible. It is logically impossible that we can draw a triangle with four sides, because ‘triangle’ means three-sided figure. To say I have a triangle with four sides is to utter a self-contradiction. It is logically impossible that it is both raining and not raining at the same place and time, and to say it is to utter a self-contradiction. All sorts of things are, however, logically possible. It is logically possible that we can accelerate a physical object to the speed of light. Even some utterly silly proposals are logically possible. It is logically possible that pigs can fly. There is nothing self-contradictory about a pig moving through the air by flapping its trotters, even though it’s physically impossible. One sometimes hears of something being a theoretical possibility. This expression, however, is ambiguous. It can mean any of the above forms of possibility depending on who is saying it or it can mean that something is allowable under a given specific theory. In philosophy, it is logical possibility and impossibility which usually take the high ground.

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Argument 2

1. If two persons could have identical perceptual beliefs (PBs) based on identically similar experiences, yet in one person’s world the PBs are true and in the other person’s world the same PBs are false, then we have no way of telling which person has the true PBs and which the false.

2. Two persons could have identical PBs based on identically similar experiences, yet in one person’s world the PBs are true and in the other person’s world the same PBs are false.

3. Therefore, the two persons have no way of telling which person has the true PBs and which the false.

ExplanationThis is valid. (Its form is ‘if p, then q, p, therefore q’.) Why, though, accept line 2? How could two person’s PBs be identically similar yet one lot be true, the other false? The circumstances of the two persons may differ but then one wonders how their PBs could be identically similar. But take the following story.

Jack and Jock both have a set of identically similar PBs. Both have experiences as of being in a garden. Each can smell the flowers, hear birds singing above, see the leaves on the trees, and so on. On the basis of these experiences both Jack and Jock believe that they are in a garden surrounded by these things. Ordinarily, and especially if neither was a philosopher, both would claim that they knew they were in a garden. The difference is that Jack really is in a garden and Jock isn’t. Jack’s experiences and PBs are caused by the garden and the things around him; Jock’s experiences and PBs are caused in entirely different ways. In fact Jock is not an embodied person at all. He is just a brain, taken out of its body some time ago and kept alive in a vat of suitable nutrients. Attached to his brain are a bunch of electrodes and wires. These feed to a machine controlled by a mad scientist. The mad scientist is sending signals to Jock’s brain that exactly match the signals Jack is receiving from his environment. The structure of their experiences are, thus, identically similar. Given that their PBs are based on those experiences, both have identical PBs. Yet, Jack’s PBs are true (he believes himself to be in a garden and is) and Jock’s PBs are false (he believes himself to be in a garden and is not).

In our story, Jack and Jock inhabit very different actual environments, yet have identically similar sense experiences and identical sets of PBs based on these experiences. This story is supposed to show that our sense experiences are consistent with alternative explanations. One has sense experiences as of XYZ and, on this basis, believes that one occupied an environment containing XYZ. That one really does occupy such an XYZ-containing environment is one possible explanation of the experience. The trouble is that there are other explanations. Being a brain in a vat is one but there are others. I could be dreaming; some sort of god (or, according to Descartes, some evil demon) could be deceiving me; I could be in a state of permanent hallucination of XYZ. Nothing in the experiences themselves can tell me – make it the case that I know – that I am in a genuine XYZ-containing-environment and not an ersatz-XYZ-containing environment. Since there seems to be nothing more than the experiences themselves to go on (what else could there be?) then there is no way I can know that I am actually in a genuine XYZ-containing-environment. For all I know, I could be anywhere. Worse, I may not be anywhere at all. I may just be a non-physical spirit having experiences as of XYZ. This delivers complete scepticism about the world. Moreover, I may be the only such person (or spirit) for my experiences as of other people may be equally deceiving. This delivers solipsism. In summary, the argument is as follows:

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Argument 2a1. If alternative hypotheses (e.g. ‘the brain-in-a-vat’ story) about the cause of

experiences are always logically possible, then any experiences may be replicated in these alternative ways

2. Alternative hypotheses (e.g. ‘the brain-in-a-vat’ story) about the cause of experiences are always logically possible.

3. Therefore, any experiences may be replicated in these alternative ways.

Since our PBs are based on our experiences, we could substitute ‘PBs’ for ‘experiences’ in the above argument. But then we have the following:

Argument 2b1. If identically similar PBs can be replicated in a variety of environments, some of

which will produce true PBs, others false, then we have no way of knowing which environment we are in, and thus no way of knowing whether our PBs are true or false.

2. Identically similar PBs can be replicated in a variety of environments, some of which will produce true PBs, others false.

3. Therefore, we have no way of knowing which environment we are in, and thus no way of knowing whether our PBs are true or false.

It all seems bizarre. I look out of my study window now, apparently seeing the world go by, and I cannot know it? Surely I can know it. For most of life’s purposes we may well be able to avoid sceptical worries. (Who is going suddenly to sit bolt upright in bed worrying that they might be a disembodied brain?) Keep in mind, however, that the sceptic does not have to think that we have any good reason for thinking our ordinary beliefs actually to be false. He just takes seriously the logical possibility that they are, and thus concludes that we cannot know that they are not false.

ResponsesWith such high stakes, many philosophers have tried to remove the ground from under the sceptic’s feet.

One kind of response is associated with the philosopher Wittgenstein. If to say ‘I doubt that p’ is intelligible, then I must know what I mean by using the words employed in p. For example, if I can intelligibly doubt that my PBs are about the items in a room around me, it must be the case that the words I use for the things in the room, as well as the word ‘room’ itself, have meaning. I can hardly use meaningless noises to express my doubt (or, indeed, express anything). The charge then is that scepticism cuts the ground from beneath its own feet, since a sceptical doubt (of the philosophical kind we have been considering) brings into doubt the very meanings of the words used to express it. What can ‘room’ mean if not (something like) ‘some space around me in a building’? The sceptic thinks that he can doubt a whole world away, yet retain the meanings of the words he employs when expressing his doubts. However, it is the very existence of the world that gives our words their meaning. What else could? That would mean that such a doubt could not be intelligibly expressed. Worse still, that our words have the meanings they do is as much an empirical fact about the world as any other. So if I cannot know any empirical fact such as there being a room around me, neither can I know what any words I use mean. (Why should the sceptic’s doubt be restricted only to a certain sub-class of empirical facts – those about things – and not about the meanings of words also?) This would mean that scepticism as a thesis could not be intelligibly expressed. Whatever the sceptic said, he could not know the meaning of any of the words he employed in saying it. Wittgenstein stressed that while doubt could always be intelligibly expressed in particular cases (people can, after all, be deceived about what is before them) it made no sense to raise doubts about the existence of the whole world.

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Wittgenstein’s charge that the sceptic could not know the meanings of words is serious. However, we shall see in the next section some special arguments for showing that the character of the world around us may be very different from the way in which we ordinarily think of it.

Points for Discussion

1. The philosopher G. E. Moore presented a famous ‘proof’ that there was an external world. He held up his hands before him, sad that he had two hands and since hands were objects in the external world, he knew that the external world existed. How could a sceptic respond?

2. The charge against the sceptic based on word meaning is extremely serious. Could a sceptic find a way that words could have genuine meaning under the possibility that the whole world is a kind of private illusion? To what could the words refer? Would it only seem that our words had meaning but really had none?

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Knowledge of the External World

Realism, Idealism and PhenomenalismArgument 3

Essential Concepts and IdeasQuite unreflectively and intuitively, we take ourselves to be surrounded by a world. (In philosophy it is often called ‘the external world’. This is supposed to distinguish it from what is literally ‘in the mind’, though the distinction is not as clear as it may sound.) Equally intuitively we take ourselves to be able to see (hear, feel, smell) objects in the ‘external’ world. As I look out of my study window now, I take myself to be seeing trees, traffic and so on. Furthermore, though we may readily acknowledge that our eyes (or mind) can sometimes ‘play tricks’, so we think we see something that isn’t really there or see it in some unusual way, nevertheless we standardly take ourselves to see objects in the world directly and unproblematically - precisely as they really are. The grass really is green and that is how I (standardly) see it – end of story. That is, we might say, intuition’s default position.

To unphilosophical souls it can come as an unwelcome (and typical) intrusion into common sense when this intuitive picture of things is questioned. The worry is not ill-founded, for it is through our sense perceptions of the world that we gain (empirical) knowledge of the world. If this seemingly solid foundation is brought into doubt, where does that leave such so-called knowledge? All the same, many philosophers have seen arguments which seem to show that our intuitions on the matter are wrong.

Essentially, there are three possible positions one can hold with respect to our perception of the world: Realism, Idealism and Phenomenalism.

Realism: In general, Realism is a philosophical stance which maintains that something is real and exists in its own right. One can be a realist with regard to any number of things. One may, for instance, be a realist about numbers or moral values. If you are, then it means that you believe numbers and moral values to exist independently of our minds, the former as denizens of some abstract world, the latter in some other way. To a realist about such things is to think that they are not just mental constructs or things in the mind. Please note: being a realist in the strict philosophical sense does not imply (and has little but a vague historical connection with) being a realist in the way conveyed in ordinary talk. That view is more of a moral stance – accepting what cannot be changed, concerning oneself with what can be changed, and so on. In philosophy, Realism is the view just outlined.

In connection with our perceptual access to the world Realism is the view that there is a world out there and we have access to it through our senses (vision, hearing, and so on). That world exists quite independently of us. If human (or any other) minds ceased to exist and were thus no longer able to perceive the world, it would, nevertheless, continue to exist in its own right. (It did so, in any case, long before there were any minds around to perceive it.) The world doesn’t need us to keep it in existence; the world is one thing, our perceiving minds something else. Each has its own logically independent existence. Realism comes in two brands – ‘direct realism’ and ‘indirect realism’ (or ‘representationalism’).

Direct realism is the intuitive view described at the beginning of this section. The world is there and we see it, more or less exactly as it is. Strictly speaking, this view is a brand of direct realism that is often called ‘naive realism’. The term isn’t (necessarily) meant to be pejorative. It is just that it is the position (assumed to be) of philosophically untutored common sense. More sophisticated versions of direct realism are better able to accommodate complications to this very simple picture that can come in the wake of scientific discoveries about the world.

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Indirect realism (Representationalism) accepts that the world exists independently of us (thus it is a form of Realism) but maintains that we do not see (or hear, etc) this world directly. Rather, it is mediated. For example, when I see an apple I do not see the apple itself. What I see is something in my mind (my brain, perhaps) – a little mental picture of an apple. Such mental pictures are composed of sense data – little patches of colour (or, in other cases, episodes of sound, etc). These are said to be caused by the objects in the world but it is the sense data that we directly see, not the external world object. Insofar as we can be said to see the external world object, we see it indirectly. (Thus, the ‘indirect’ part.) We see external objects indirectly by virtue of apprehending directly these sense data. The sense data or mental pictures can be said to ‘represent’ the real, external world objects. We shall be looking at arguments for this position later.

Idealism. Like Realism this term too has a strictly philosophical meaning as well as an everyday use. In philosophy it is nothing to do with having ideals or, perhaps, holding to slightly unworldly views on various matters. In philosophy, like ‘Realism’, ‘Idealism’ is a technical term for a metaphysical doctrine. It is the view that what we take to be the world out there has no existence independently of our minds. The world is one large mental construct, its objects – from stones to stars – nothing more than things in (or caused by) our minds (or perhaps, God’s). Worldly objects are mental objects. Traditionally, such mental objects have been called ‘Ideas’. (Oh dear, again! ‘Ideas’ in this special sense should not be confused with ‘ideas’ in the ordinary sense of ‘having ideas’. One can believe that these ideas exist (perhaps as firing neurones in the brain) without being an Idealist.) It is our special use of the term ‘Idea’ that gives the doctrine its title. (It is often noted that, perhaps ‘Idea-ism’ would have been a better title. It would certainly be a more accurate one, just more difficult to say.) The word ‘Idea’ in the sense intended by Idealism is frequently spelled with a capital ‘I’.

Idealism is like Representationalism (Indirect Realism) in one sense. This similarity can be expressed by means of an analogy. In both cases it is rather as though we are locked inside our own theatres seeing the action on our mental stages (or cinema screens if you wish). The difference between the two doctrines is this. Under Representationalism, the objects on our private mental stage represent the objects in the world beyond – the stage action, we might say, tracks the real-world action; under Idealism, there is no outer world, only the mental theatre and its mental action and mental contents.

It is also worth noting that, under Idealism, it is not only objects that are mental entities, so are the space and time in which they are contained or of which they are somehow a part. Objects can still, thus, be ‘out there’ in the sense in which they are in space, whilst still being in, or of, the mind. Further, even the objects of modern science go the same way. Atoms are as much mental entities (even if not quite the same type) as chairs and tables. Simply noting that objects are quite clearly out there in space beyond our heads, cannot therefore, refute idealism. Indeed, it cannot be refuted by observation or experiment at all. The world comes out looking as it always has (How else could it look?) regardless of the truth or falsity of Idealism. (Metaphysical doctrines are like that.)

It would probably be fair to say that most philosophers nowadays (at least in the English-speaking world of modern analytic philosophy) are not Idealists. But it is not entirely a dead-duck. It has its arguments. These have to be taken seriously and some have been convinced by them.

Phenomenalism. This is the view that what we call objects in the world (in the widest sense of ‘object’, so as to include rainbows as well as chairs and table) are nothing but collections of actual and possible sense experiences. Further, it maintains that to talk of an object is to talk of a certain set of sense data. ‘I see a chair’ thus translates to (something like) ‘I am experiencing a such and such shaped collection of sense experiences’. ‘There is a chair in the other room’ would translate into (very roughly) ‘If I moved into the other room, I would experience a such and such shaped collection of sense experiences’.

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All this talk of sense data may make it seem that Phenomenalism is like Representationalism or Idealism. The difference between this view and Representationalism is that, under Phenomenalism, there is no world beyond causing the sense experiences, only the sense data themselves. In fact calling them ‘sense experiences’ is rather misleading, since we do not have deliverances from our senses at all. Eyes, brains and bodies are objects and go the way of all objects under Phenomenalism. The difference between Phenomenalism and Idealism is that the former does not take its collections of sense experiences to be mental. Rather, what we call the mental and the physical worlds are nothing more than various and diverse ways of collecting the so-called sense experiences themselves. Nor do idealists have to lumber themselves with the idea that talk of objects needs to be translated into talk of sense experiences. (We will shortly see why I say ‘lumber’ here.)

Why three doctrines? Why, if Realism – perhaps, Direct Realism – seems more in tune with ordinary intuition, cannot we just opt for that, without further ado? The answer is that arguments exist for and against each doctrine. We must see what they are in order to assess their strength.

There are a number of arguments which attempt to prove that the objects we actually see can never be the spatial objects around us which we take our objects of sight to be, but must instead be objects inside our own minds. In other words, such arguments attempt to show that Direct Realism is wrong and that Representationalism is correct.

The first of the arguments for Indirect Realism is the Time-Lag Argument. Although the argument applies to all objects, it is most dramatically expressed by using an example from astronomy. We look upwards at the night sky and we see what we take to be a star. But the light reaching us from the star at the moment of our seeing it started on its journey many years, even centuries, ago. The star itself may have ceased to exist during this time. Certainly something, however, is before my mind as I gaze heavenwards and if it happens not to be the star what can it be but something else? And what can the something else be if not something in my mind - a sense datum? Bertrand Russell, perhaps the most famous philosopher of the 20th Century, also using an astronomical example, puts it thus:

"Though you see the sun now, the physical object to be inferred from your seeing existed eight minutes ago; if in the intervening minutes the sun had gone out, you would still be seeing exactly what you are seeing. We cannot therefore identify the physical sun with what we see." (Russell, B., Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, 1948, p.201)

Spelled out, Russell’s argument seems to be thus:

Argument 3a (The ‘Time-Lag’ Argument)1. If something can be seen, then it must exist at the time of seeing it.2. What we see as the sun can be seen but the sun itself may not exist.3. Therefore, what we see as the sun cannot be the sun itself.

ExplanationAlthough this argument is about a specific object – the sun – it does not require much command of science to understand that it applies to all objects at a spatial distance from us, for light has a finite (if fast) speed and it takes time to get to us. What applies to the sun, therefore, applies to all objects, even close by ones. The time scale may be dramatic only in astronomical examples but in the case of all objects, we may see what we think are those objects at times at which they may not exist. If they must exist at the time of our seeing them, then what we see cannot be those objects. But if not, then what do we see? There seems to be little choice here save to say that we must see something inside us, for that something would exist at the time of our seeing them. Yet what could these inner items be if not sense data?

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ResponsesElsewhere, Russell says,

"The supposition of common sense and naive realism, that we see the actual physical object, is very hard to reconcile with the scientific view that our perception occurs somewhat later than the emission of light by the object . . ." (Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Matter, 1927 p.155)

If the first quotation states Russell’s argument, this second quotation may contain the clue as to its failure and also as to why Russell was impressed by the argument. Russell is identifying what we see with certain events inside our own heads because we cannot actually see anything before such events take place. The assumption is that the object of perception must be actually before our eyes at the time we perceive it. However, this assumption may be queried. In order to see how it can be questioned we need to make an essential distinction between what may be called the 'event' and 'object' of visual perception.

The event of perception one may take to be simply that event taking place inside a perceiving subject which grounds that subject's visual experience when he perceives an object and which is caused by that object. It is the relevant event which takes place at the subject end of the perceptual transaction. It is not to be confused with the object perceived: we do not perceive the event of our perceiving something. (Though we characteristically know when we are perceiving something.) The event of perception is something which takes place inside us. It is the final element of the causal chain that leads from the object perceived, through the space between the object and our eyes, to the various neural and chemical events that take place inside our skulls.

The object of perception is quite simply the object or part of the world that is perceived. Although there are what may be called 'usual channels' by which subjects come to perceive objects - I see the page before me now, for instance, as a result of light coming from the page, my eyes being in normal working order, my optical apparatus conveying neural messages to my brain, and so on - there seems no reason to think that such channels should be the only ones by which subjects should come to perceive the world. (Think of the possibility of artificial eyes being carried around, perhaps, in the subject's hands.)

Having made these distinctions we must now see what happens when we apply them to the present argument. The argument may be seen to rest upon a simple confusion between the event and the object of perception. Distinguish these separate though causally linked items and we can retain the scientifically backed causal story without being forced into Russell's conclusion. Quite simply, it is the event not the object of perception which must, according to the causal story, take place only when the brain is suitably stimulated. It is the event of perception which is to be identified with (regarded as the same thing as) what goes on in the head and which takes place at the later end of the time lag between the light leaving an object and our perceiving it. The object, then, does not have to actually be before our eyes at a particular moment in order that it should be seen at that moment. Distinguish object and event and we can see how this is so. The time lag argument confuses these two things and thus does not work.

Another famous argument is ‘The Argument from Illusion’. We can illustrate this argument by taking the example of the so-called Muller-Lyer figure, found in many psychology textbooks. This consists of two straight lines each of the same length. One of the lines terminates with arrow-heads thus <--->, the other with arrow- heads terminating thus >---<. This has the effect that the line of the former figure looks shorter than the line in the latter. Lines of different length seem to be present before our minds. Since the lines on the paper are really the same length, the argument proposes that the lines that we see as differing in length must be somewhere else - inside our minds.

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Argument 3b (The Argument from Illusion)1. If what we see and the external object are the very same thing, then they must

have the same properties.2. What we see and the external object do not have the same properties.3. Therefore, what we see and the external object are not the same thing.

ExplanationThe first premise rests on a law of logic. If what seem like two objects are really one and the same object, then the two must have the same properties. How else could it be? There is only the one object after all. For example, the so-called ‘evening star’ and ‘Venus’ are two different names for the same planet. This being so then given that the one is a certain distance from the sun, the other must be too. If they had two different distances from the sun, then they really would be they- that is, two different objects. The second premise rests on the fact that the object as we see it may have properties that the external worldly object itself does not have. (In our example, the two seen lines have different lengths yet the worldly lines both have the same length.)

Other properties are sometimes thought to present a similar problem. For instance, we see objects as coloured. It is at least arguable that objects in reality are not coloured. For one thing, objects are composed of quite colourless collections of atoms. There are other reasons for placing colours in the mind. For one thing, the colour an object seems to have seems to depend on the perceiver as much as on the object. Imagine some operation on the eyes (or brain) which made us see grass as red instead of green. Which colour would grass be then? Yet the grass would not have changed in itself at all. Yet since the objects as we see them are coloured, where could they be if not in the mind.

ResponseFirst, we must deal with a fairly obvious difficulty. Since the way we tell that the lines in the Muller-Lyer illusion are really the same length is by measuring the lines we see, we must surely say that what we see as different and what we measure to be the same, are one and the same set of lines. The point is, however, that if we conclude that the things we see are internal to our minds and are not the actual lines on the paper, we have a ready explanation of the difference we see. The lines we see, the internal, mental lines, really are different; it is only the lines on the paper which share the same length.

It may seem that we could deal with this worry very simply. When I see an object as having a certain property even when it does not, could I not simply say that I believe or at least have some tendency to believe that it has that property?

This may not, however, get at the real worry. Illusion is not simply (or not at all) the same thing as false belief. Things can look all sorts of ways without my beliefs about them being affected. A coin, for instance, may look elliptical (in some sense) when seen from a non-perpendicular angle. But what does this amount to? I do not believe that the coin is elliptical, nor do I have any tendency to believe such a thing. My belief that the coin is circular is immune to the illusion. This is presumably because my belief has (at least normally) its own firm foundations, such as my further beliefs that coins are made to be circular and that the object before me is a coin and not some trick object. Indeed, so strong is my belief, that there is a sense in which a circular coin still (in some sense) looks circular even when seen from a non- perpendicular angle. So the belief (in this case) dictates the looks, not the other way round. (Although, of course, looks can influence beliefs.)

One can give further examples which show that illusion is not a tendency to believe. Macbeth, for example, didn't just falsely believe there was a dagger before him; it visually seemed to him that there was one. Similarly, when I immerse a stick into a jar of water, something bent just visually seems to be before my mind; and two lines of different length visually seem to be

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before my mind in the case of the Muller-Lyer illusion. In other words, it really does seem that actual bent-ness, elliptical-ness, and so on, are there in the cases we have discussed. This is what gives the Argument from Illusion its strength. I do not simply have false beliefs about the stick and the lines, and so on. Indeed, I may well have true beliefs about them. I believe the stick to be straight and the lines to be of the same length because I am familiar with the illusions. Yet, the sheer visual appearance of bent-ness, and so on, persists, even in the teeth of this true belief. All this requires careful treatment if we are to avoid the conclusion that something really is bent or of different lengths and so on. Once we fall prey to that, there seems nowhere to put them but our minds.

One may wish here to point out that the fact that an object looks as if it has a certain property even when it doesn’t, still has some connection with the beliefs we have about the object. In the case of the coin, for instance, one may still say that ellipticality is involved (in some sense) at some level in my experience, and that it is only because it is thus involved that I know I am looking at a circular coin from a non-perpendicular angle. But this simply leaves us with our original problem, for just what is the 'sense' in which the coin looks elliptical?

What stands in need of explanation here is the appearance of a property (ellipticality, bent-ness, difference in length, and so on); and our explanation must involve neither the actual instance of the property nor, for our own part, any (tendency towards) the belief that it the property is actually there. But does such an explanation exist? And by 'explain' here we do not merely mean 'give a satisfactory causal account of how the illusion works'. Our problem occurs at the experiential rather than the causal level. Experientially we seem to be confronted with a property that isn’t really there. Given this, how can we avoid being committed to the view that we actually are confronted by that property?

Here we need to draw upon another aspect of perception – what can be called the mode of perception. The mode of visual perception is, roughly, how things seem to the subject. I don't just see things, I see them in some way or, rightly or wrongly, as certain sorts of thing. The distinction between object and mode seems to be forced upon us by a tension between two facts: a) the object's presence at the time not being necessary to one having a visual experience as of that object, and b) the mode's necessarily being present in the experience. In other words, though a perceptual experience must have some content, there need be no object before one's eyes.

We must also note that the mode can never determine the object. Many quite different objects could be involved in perceptions which have qualitatively exactly similar experiential (and phenomenal) modes and many different types of modes could arise in the process of perceiving any one object. The concepts we use when we describe the mode of our perception do not, we could say, uniquely identify a particular object. The object apprehended, therefore, may not be that which the subject takes himself to be apprehending.

How does this apply to the Argument from Illusion? Here I will use a technique often used by philosophers – use letters to stand for different elements in what I say. It saves space. To say that object O looks to subject S as if it has property P, even though it does not actually have that property, is to say that O looks to S the way it would do if it really were to have P. In short, we see O in a distorted way or mode. The point here is that it is still the external object, O itself, which is appearing some way to the perceiver, not some other object in the mind of the perceiver, but it is appearing in some distorted way. The stick, for example, looks bent because it looks the way it would look if it really were bent; and the Muller-Lyer lines look as though they have different lengths because they look the way they would if they really were of different lengths.

The mistake of the Representationalist is to treat the appearance of a property as if it were the same sort of thing as the actual occurrence of the property. However, a property can appear either the way it is (as when a straight object appears straight) or it may appear in a different

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form (as when a straight object appears to be bent). But in the latter case, we do not need to find an alternative object which really does have the property as it appears: we simply have the true and false appearances of properties. The Representationalist seems to be saying that in the latter case, some other object really does have the property as it appears to us. Our present account, on the other hand, simply points out that the original object can appear to have a property it does not in fact have.

Argument 3cRemember that the Representationalist is arguing like this:

1. The seen object has property P.2. The object in external reality does not have property P.3. Therefore, the seen object is not the object in external reality.

Our present response is to deny (1). The object as seen does not have property P. Rather, it has some other property – call it R – that the real object has. It’s just that R appears to us (under special conditions) as though it is P. Since the property the object seen has – R – is also something the object in reality also has, we are not prevented from saying that the object seen is the object in reality and not something purely in the mind.

Problems with RepresentationalismQuite aside from any failure of the above arguments to establish Representationalism (if you think they do), this doctrine has its own problems anyway.

First: One philosophical problem of perception is to say exactly what it is that we directly see when we perceive something. The Representationalist argues that it cannot be the external object and then goes on to solve the problem by saying that it is some internal object we see. We see the external object indirectly by virtue of seeing the internal object directly. Very well. How do we see the internal object? If we give the same sort of explanation, we embark on what philosophers call an infinite regress, for we must see the internal object indirectly by virtue of seeing some other sort of object more directly. Fine! But where do (or could) we stop. A useful little picture of this problem is to imagine a set of Chinese dolls – each doll next in sees what the next doll further out delivers to it. Infinite regresses are often taken to show weaknesses in a position, for they show that some problem has not really been solved, only pushed back a stage. Further, if there is a genuine problem of how outer objects can really be coloured, then how is it that inner ones can be? On the other hand, if the explanation of how we see internal objects is of a different sort, then we need to know what sort of explanation there is on offer. (It has been tried, even by this author, but matters get very complicated and they need a level of exploration we need not embark upon here.)

Second: We have the so-called ‘veil of perception’ problem. If Representationalism is correct, it is as though we have a veil drawn over our minds obscuring us from reality – a veil of inner mental terms – the things we are said to see directly. We have no direct access to the outer world at all. The problem then becomes whether we can know anything at all about the outer world. Worse still: Can we even know that it exists? We cannot just say that the inner items we do see must be caused by something, because it may be said that our whole concept of cause comes from or can only apply to the world we do have access to – in this case, the inner one. Perhaps, there is only the inner world. In this case, there wouldn’t be much sense in calling it an ‘inner’ world; it just is all the world there is. This seems to push us towards either Idealism or Phenomenalism. As with the first problem, there have been valiant attempts by Representationalists to get around it, but we cannot do this here.

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Problems with Idealism

First: The world and its objects are mental. The notable Idealist George Berkeley bequeathed to the world an unforgettable slogan by which we can remember his philosophy. ‘Esse est percipi’ (‘To exist is to be perceived’) Things do not exist when we do not experience them. Just blink and things (so it would seem to have to be) go out of existence, only to flash back into existence a moment later. This seems crazy. Idealists of various kinds have devised means of addressing this problem. (See ‘Point for Discussion’ No 6 below.)Second: What about other people? If all I can ever see are my own ‘Ideas’, then are you just one of my Ideas? Am I alone, accompanied only by my own Ideas? This rather depressing doctrine is called Solipsism. Still, it has one advantage. If it is true then you need never feel embarrassed by doing something stupid in front of your friends. Your friends aren’t there. You have none.

Problems with Phenomenalism

First: The problem of Solipsism arises again. Can you see why?Second: There is the problem of translating statements about objects into statements that refer only to actual or possible sense data. Think: there are many ways in which we would ordinarily wish to say an object can appear. Endless and quite different collections of actual and possible sense data are associated with any given kind of object. It is widely accepted that all attempts at such translation have failed. If you feel sad enough to try, see Point 6 below.Are we thus driven back to Direct Realism? Perhaps, but remember the colour problem.

Points for Discussion

1. Idealism cannot be refuted by noting that (some) objects seem solid. It was once famously tried. In the 18th Century, Samuel Johnson (a notable big-head) tried to refute George Berkeley (a notable Idealist) by kicking a heavy stone and declaring, ‘I refute Berkeley thus’. Be warned, this is the way to personal injury not philosophical insight as to the fundamental nature of the world. Forget the stupidity of Johnson’s attempt, however, and try to say just why it was also futile as a refutation?

2. If metaphysical doctrines cannot be refuted or confirmed by observation or experiment, how can they be refuted or confirmed (if at all)?

3. Even if you do not know much about Berkeley, you may be able to figure out how he used the notion of God to rescue the existence of things not being perceived at any given moment.

4. We have seen that a problem for Phenomenalism is one of finding adequate translations of talk of objects into talk of collections of actual or possible sense data. In this connection, when I said the following: ‘I see a chair’ thus translates to (something like) ‘I am experiencing a such and such shaped collection of sense data’, why could I not have just said a ‘chair-shaped’ collection of sense data? Also, I said that ‘There is a chair in the other room’ would translate into (very roughly) ‘If I moved into the other room, I would experience a such and such shaped collection of sense data’. This, however, is an incomplete translation. Why?

5. Is Solipsism really a good criticism of any position which leads to it? If not, why not?

6. Translate into language which refers only to sense-data the following: ‘The car is parked, unseen, in a completely dark garage next to the lawnmower which stands near the wall’.

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Moral Philosophy

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Moral Philosophy contents

The Structure of the Module

Moral Philosophy: What is goodness? What ends should we pursue? What makes our actions right or wrong? What should we morally value? What does it mean to say that we ought (or ought not) to do something?

Normative Ethics: Can we ever establish any ‘first principles’ governing what is right or good: Deontological Views: these see certain acts as right or wrong in themselves. Our moral duty is established either by God or reason. Consequentialism: The main form is – Utilitarianism: acts are right or wrong not in themselves but in terms of their consequences – specifically the degree to which they maximise pleasure or suffering. (Different forms of Utilitarianism). Virtue Theory: here the focus is on the cultivation of virtues as being the source of human flourishing.

Practical Ethics: The application of ethical theories to practical situations – euthanasia and abortion.

Meta-Ethics: Are there any moral facts or moral qualities? Are moral judgements capable of being true or false? Can moral facts be known? Cognitivism answers ‘Yes’ to the foregoing questions;Non-Cognitivism answers ‘No’. Two forms of Cognitivism:

Intuitionism – which says that goodness and rightness are not to be understood in terms of any natural properties in anything but are intuited and real; Moral Realism – which says that moral values describe objective properties of things. Two forms of Non-Cognitivism: Emotivism: moral judgements are expressions of emotions intended to influence the feelings (and behaviour) of others; Prescriptivism: moral judgements express rational and universalisable commendations to act in certain ways. The problems of each of these positions will also be addressed.

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Normative Ethics contents

Some Preliminary Discussion

There would be something quite unspeakable about the business of engaging in moral philosophy if one had little in the way of human decency or basic compassion. Nonetheless, being good is philosophically problematic. What the good is seems to have something to do with us, but what exactly? There seem to many good things we can do, but why are those things good? Quite often we can, in some sense, just tell that some action is right or wrong, but what makes them right or wrong? We often say that something ought (or ought not) to be done, but what exactly do we mean by this? Can there be any moral facts? For instance if we say ‘Hitler was a bad man’, is that a fact in the same way as ‘Hitler was the German leader’ is a fact, even if it is a very different sort of fact? Or, in saying ‘Hitler was a bad man’ are we just voicing an attitude towards Hitler – one of revulsion at what he did? Can ‘moral talk’ be ‘fact talk’ at all? Or is it just a way of getting things off our chest?

Do not think that one can escape the necessity for moral theory. In the first place, not every moral problem presents us with an obvious solution. In situations involving abortion and euthanasia, the right thing to do may well be difficult to decide, and if matters seem clear, this will only be because some implicit moral assumptions are being made (assumptions about the ‘sanctity of life’, perhaps). Further, while one may just be able to tell, on some occasions, that something is right and good (or the opposite) this too will be due to an (often unquestioned) overall conception of what constitutes goodness. In short, our judgements and actions are, at least in part, guided by an unspoken moral theory.

Try thinking what it would be like to be you and not have the issues of good and bad, right and wrong, raised in your mind. They are built-in as a fundamental part of our very conception of what it is to be a person. Sometimes we just do not know what to do. Sometimes we are faced with moral dilemmas. There are two (maybe more) things we ought to do but cannot do them both. Just occasionally, we may be responsible for something so awful that we wonder if there can be a way out of the hell in which we have set ourselves. In a philosophy book I have been reading recently, the author tells of a man who negligently left his baby daughter in the back of his locked and sealed car all day. He genuinely thought that he had deposited her with her carer but had simply forgotten. Perhaps something was on his mind. It was a very hot day and when he returned to his car, he found his child lying dead in her seat. It is pretty well impossible to imagine the despair (assuming that he was an ordinary decent fellow and not a natural monster) that must have welled up inside him. We feel sadness beyond words at such a thing, of course, but we also shiver with fear because we know deep inside that none of us is utterly immune to the kind of error that poor man committed. We all know of moral luck. What, I wonder, ought our attitude be towards this person? What now should he do that is decent? This is a very dramatic example of the way in which we find ourselves to be moral creatures but, while it occupies an extreme end of the spectrum, we all find ourselves reflecting upon what is the right thing to do, what things are good for us, how we should lead good and fulfilling lives and what to do about it if we are not. In the work which follows you will come to develop your own thoughts on how far moral philosophy can help.

What then is it that makes an action right or wrong? A number of candidate answers spring to mind. People draw upon them from time to time so it is important to see what is wrong with them. A first response might be that an action is wrong if it is against the rules. But why accept this? There may be bad rules. Even laws can be bad - laws not allowing criticism of your government, for instance.

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One may think that feelings must enter our consideration somehow. But how? Certainly we are caused to have feelings of various sorts by the good and bad acts we witness or get to know about. But think: your bad feelings are probably caused by your view that the act in question is wrong. Right-minded people feel bad because such things are wrong; they are not wrong because right-minded people feel bad about them.

Now let's take a better response. An act is wrong or bad because it makes somebody suffer, e.g., someone had their property stolen. Even here, though, we have to be careful. Sometimes a theft may cause only minor inconvenience on the part of the victim but bring considerable pleasure to the thief. Would this mean that the theft was not wrong after all? One may well wish to say that morality has something to do with human feelings and well-being but finding out precisely what may not be easy.

We can, however say more about the above suggestion. Theft makes its victims suffer. This is supposed to provide a reason for not doing it. But what if the thief doesn't care about the victim? Suppose he just says, "Who cares? I've got what I want." You take yourself to have found a reason for not stealing, but if the thief just doesn't care, what reason will he have for not just carrying on? Indeed, being sure that he can continue to get away with stealing (and lots of thieves never do get caught) combined with just not caring about his victims and the sure knowledge that his ill-gotten gains will give him much pleasure, may seem to provide him with every reason to continue in his present ways - or so it will seem to him.

Reasons can, seemingly, cut both ways. So, the position in our present story is that we have reasons for not being thieves but someone else may have reasons for being one; we care, the thief doesn't.

We may here wish to say that the thief should care about others. We may also point out that just because he doesn't care doesn't mean that what he is doing is all right. A mugger on the streets of New York may kill someone just to take a few dollars and may not care about what he has done, but that doesn't make him exempt from morality. But why is he not exempt? Why should he care about right and wrong?

Some people try to give morality a religious basis. If you do this, you will try to give an answer to the 'Why care?' question by pointing out something else that the person cares about - or might be brought to care about - and linking moral action to that.

A very popular move here, at least in the past, has been the 'Hellfire and Damnation' strategy. The first move is to acknowledge that while one may get away with terrible crimes and deeds in this life, such actions are forbidden by God. The second move is to point out that God will reward or punish you according to the degree of your compliance with his regulations. An assumption of this strategy is that if there is no God (or at any rate not one who acts in this way) then morality is an illusion and anything can be permitted.

Before seeing the difficulties with this strategy, however, it is worth laying out another, rather similar one. After all, many religious people today, more enlightened than their judgmental and condemnatory forbears, may think that the hellfire and damnation strategy is too crude a way of linking religion with morality and makes a false point about God. The truth is, rather, that God loves you and the moral motive for obeying his commands comes out of a reciprocated love and not out of fear of hell. We are sheep led to right action and good living by God's love, not his punitive powers. Let us, therefore, call this the 'Loving Shepherd' strategy. Here it is love, not fear, which grounds morality.

Of course, one obvious difficulty with all this is that there are many people who do not believe in God and yet still make judgements of right and wrong, good and bad, and it isn't stunningly obvious that such people are disbarred properly from doing so. But this is not the fundamental problem for our twin religious strategies. The really big problem is as follows:

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Even if God does exist and does forbid something - say murder - it is still hard to see how it could be this very fact which actually makes it wrong. How can God make things right or wrong? Murder is surely just wrong all by itself. That is surely why God forbids it. Its being wrong is why God forbids it; it is not wrong because God forbids it. It is the wrongness of the act which explains God's prohibition, not God's prohibition which explains the wrongness.

If you have a problem seeing this, try to imagine God forbidding something quite trivial - wearing wide ties, for example. If he did, are we really supposed to believe that this would make wearing wide ties morally wrong? Yet this is what we should believe if we believe that what makes things morally wrong is no more than that they go against God's commands. Of course, if we believe in anything like the Christian God, we will not seriously entertain the prospect that he would ever prohibit such a trivial thing as wearing wide ties. But why do we assume this? Surely because we think that we are dealing here with a trivial matter, one which couldn't possibly be morally wrong in the first place. And we would also surely think that God, being perfect in his perceptions, sees the triviality of it even more clearly than we do. In short we would think that God himself does not condemn wearing wide ties precisely because he does not see it as morally wrong. It would be preposterous to suppose that he could make it morally wrong merely by deciding to forbid it.

Now it is important to recognise that this fundamental problem in linking religion to morality applies whether we put the emphasis on God's love or on his punitiveness. God may well exist, and he may have love for us all without limit, but even if this is the correct way to look at it, the problem remains. Whether we are going to be rewarded by continuing to be bathed in God's love for not wearing wide ties, or punished in some way for doing so, it can hardly be such facts that make wearing wide ties wrong. It cannot conceivably be a wrong action. Similarly, it is not the fact of God's love or punishment, even if these do ensue, which makes murder wrong. Murder is just wrong.

This is part of a more general problem. If we do something good because of the thought of reward (Godly or Earthly) or just because we want to be treated in the same way ourselves; if we avoid what is bad because we wish to avoid punishment (again, from any source) or perhaps because we don’t want the same thing to be done to us – then are we really being moral at all? It begins to seem that if we do good or avoid doing bad for any reason other than the fact that something is just good or bad, then we are morally suspect.

But can we argue rationally about morality at all? The existence of moral conflict and disagreement and the seeming lack of any way of objectively resolving these matters might lead us to the view that moral judgements are not, strictly speaking, proper judgements at all. Compare this with Science. Here, careful, systematic observation of empirical matters can often resolve conflict of opinion on matters of fact concerning natural things and properties, but there seems no analogous objective court of appeal where morals are concerned.

This might lead us to suppose that morality is more a matter of feeling rather than reason. Actions are to be considered good and bad purely in accordance with whether they produce in us feelings of approval or revulsion. So, the fact 'x is good' means no more than 'x is approved of'. To say, for instance, that Jesus is good is to say 'Hooray for Jesus', and to say that Hitler is bad is just to say 'Boo to Hitler'.

Many people may find this idea amenable. For one thing, it seems to get us out of the seemingly impossible task of finding some more objective basis for morals - there is no such basis - it's just a matter of how you feel about things. Secondly, it gives us an explanation of the deep rifts which exist between the morals of different cultures - we just have different sets of feelings, which have been moulded by the equally different courses of our upbringings.

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But the 'Boo-Hurrah' approach to morals isn't as good as it sounds. For one thing, it seems to go against the way we tend to think about our moral evaluations. Take the evaluation 'Hitler was bad'. Do we normally think of this as resulting from our negative feelings about Hitler? Of course, we do have feelings of revulsion towards Hitler. But is our simply feeling a particular way all we really think Hitler's badness amounts to? Surely our feelings of revulsion are caused by his badness and not the other way round. We first judge that he is bad. Furthermore, if it is a genuine judgement, we can rationally enquire into its basis. Things can at least seem to be good or bad independently of our feelings. Our feelings towards acts and persons seem to be caused by the way we judge their goodness and badness, not the other way round.

Secondly, although feelings may have some place in morality, reasoning enters into the picture also. What we need to show is how. How can we show that acting rightly is also acting reasonably? If we can show this, we will have found something extremely damaging to the idea that it is all just a matter of how we feel.

One way of linking reasons (or rationality) with morality is to maintain that we do have a good rational criterion for acting rightly towards others. This is based on how impartiality and rationality are necessarily related. We can back this up with the following argument. Being concerned with searching for truth presumes acceptance of impartiality. But being impartial means acting according to reason and not being swayed by irrelevant points. This requires treating others as centres of judgement. This is because they may have something to contribute. But this comes down to having respect for persons, having a certain degree of respect for the other as a source of judgement. If this argument is good, it shows that there is a rational basis for respecting persons, that is, in acting morally. If we genuinely seek truth, we must have respect for other people.

But this sort of reasoning seems a bit limited. It is not clear that the kind of respect for persons it requires is really moral in nature. Surely it amounts only to respecting others as potentially reliable sources of truths. Yet one can do this and yet still treat them in a thoroughly rotten way. And there are those who are extremely rotten - they care about nobody but themselves, even if they still respect others in the sense that they treat them as reliable sources of information. Even many of us who are not selfish may care only about a few people - family, friends, those we work with, and so on. Yet morality is supposed to apply to all. Our problem is to find a reason, say, not to hurt other people - any others at all, including the many millions we do not know. One very popular argument at this stage is the ‘How-Would-You-Like-It-If-That-Were-Done-To-You?’ argument. This tends to be a very popular line in bringing up children - make them think how they would feel. Of course, sometimes this works. If it does, all well and good. But what if it doesn't?

Let us try a better way of linking rationality and morality. Suppose I want to get home quickly from somewhere and I see a bicycle leaning against a wall. I'm about to take it when a friend who is with me says, 'Hey, you can't take that, it belongs to someone else. They'll miss it. How would you like it if someone did this to your bicycle?' Such a response is supposed to make me hesitate, to make me think, 'I wouldn't like that one little bit'. But now suppose I say - being not only a common thief but also an astute philosopher used to making clever distinctions - 'Of course I wouldn't like it if someone were to do this to me, but no one is doing it to me. I'm doing it to someone else, and I don't mind about that at all’. Yet to respond in this way isn't just nasty, it misses the point my friend is trying to make. Of course I wouldn't like it if someone were to do the same to me but there's more to it than just not liking it, the way I wouldn't like it, for example if I hit my hand with a hammer. I'd resent the thief. I would think he had no right to do such a thing. But then this is to come up with a reason why it shouldn't be done to me. And if it is a reason, then it applies all round. Think about it. The reason isn't just that I would be aggrieved. There would be no particular reason for a thief to take my bike as opposed to anybody else's. There's nothing special about me in all this. If the reason given is genuinely a reason for someone not to take my bike, it's also a reason for me

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not to take anyone else's bike. Reasons apply to us all. They are, we might say, universal. We have here a reason for no one taking anyone else's bike. Therefore, it would be a reason for me not to take this bicycle. Of course, taking this line with many thieves might not get us very far. Their motive to steal may well outrun their capacity to reason. But the important thing to appreciate is that reasons really do seem to enter into the picture as far as morals are concerned.

We can, of course, generalise all this. If I admit that someone else would have no reason to come along and do harm of any sort to me (in similar circumstances) and if I concede that this reason doesn't just apply to me, then it is a matter of simple consistency that I admit that I have no reason to harm anyone else. Thieves are not just nasty, they do not just have different feelings - they also fail to see reason.

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Essential Concepts and Ideas

Deontological ViewsThe Greek word dei means ‘one must’. From this we derive the word ‘deontological’. Moral theories are deontological if they lay stress on which acts must (or must not) be done. They must be done (or not done) because they are right (or wrong) in themselves and not (primarily) because they have the consequences they do. One of the most important deontologists was the 18th Century German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Frequently (and it is interesting to reflect on why) deontologists focus their attention on what acts are wrong. A popular example is promise breaking. The deontologist maintains that it goes against the moral grain to break a promise, even if doing so were to result in an overall increase in happiness or pleasure. There is something just nasty about promise breaking. It is wrong intrinsically. Promises are made not to be broken. For the deontologist anyone who thinks otherwise has simply forgotten (or doesn’t appreciate in the first place) the essential nature of a promise. (It is important here to distinguish deontology from moral absolutism – deontology does not commit one to the view that certain acts are right or wrong entirely regardless of the consequences. Exceptionally, a promise may be broken; it is just that promises are still acts which (according to their nature) are to be honoured.

A further important feature in deontological ethics is the notion of rights. A present-day deontologist – the American philosopher Robert Nozick – argues that rights constitute constraints on what we may or may not do. For example, it may be that killing one healthy person to use his parts to furnish two other physically deficient persons would have the consequence of increasing the overall amount of pleasure or happiness there is in the world. It would be wrong to do this, however, because such an act would violate the rights of the person to be killed.

ConsequentialismUtilitarianism is a consequentialist theory. This means that it lays stress on the consequences of our acts. Essentially an act is right if and only if it has certain kinds of consequences.

Classical UtilitarianismAdvanced by the 18th Century philosopher Jeremy Bentham and developed by James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill, in the 19th century, Classical Utilitarianism focuses on happiness. It starts off from the more or less common-sense position that we all want to be happy and turns happiness into the key concept of morality. Always act, says Utilitarianism, so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Bentham called this the ‘principle of utility’ (thus the name ‘Utilitarianism’).

There are some considerable advantages to Classical Utilitarianism: Utilitarianism is an essentially egalitarian doctrine. Each person is to count equally; the happiness of one cannot count as more or less important than the happiness of another. This has the consequence that if an action you are considering doing will result in an increase in your happiness but would, overall, decrease the happiness in the world, it would not be good. Also, it is secular, so does not depend on debatable religious truths (useful in an increasingly secular age); it is connected with (what is supposed to be) our most fundamental desire – to be happy; and it provides a way of working out what we must do on particular occasions – it provides, we might say, a decision procedure.*

* There are other forms of consequentialism. They may be compared (roughly) thus: Ethical Egoism: an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are better for the agent performing the action. Ethical Altruism: an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are better for everyone except the agent. Utilitarianism: an action is morally right if the consequences of that action are better for everyone.

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Normative Ethics: Utilitarianism

Argument 4

One way of arguing against theories in normative ethics goes like this:

Argument 41. If the theory T is correct then doing action A would be right2. Action A is not right3. Therefore theory T cannot be correct

This form of argument is clearly valid. Its general form is If P then Q; not-Q; therefore not-P. Here is a specific example:

Argument 4a1 If Classical Utilitarianism is correct, then killing a single healthy person to

obtain their organs for the cure of four unhealthy individuals would be right.2 Killing a single healthy person to obtain their organs for the cure of four

unhealthy individuals would not be right.3 Therefore, Classical Utilitarianism is not correct

ExplanationThe flourishing of four people is presumably greater than the flourishing of one. (Assuming that we are taking the units of flourishing to be equal. Can we see flourishing in this way?) Yet an action such as this goes against out strongest moral intuitions. What do we do? Stick to the theory or our intuitions? Here it is worth pointing out that under any moral theory, we simply seem to have to start with certain moral intuitions. Some actions seem so clearly wrong that the fact that a given moral theory must recommend it implies that the moral theory must itself be wrong. Any decent moral theory must issue in commands that are right and that we can see are good.

Another way of arguing against a position is to show that such a position rests upon unwarranted or just plain false assumptions.

Argument 4b1. Theory T can be correct iff Assumption A is accepted.2. Assumption A cannot be accepted3. So Theory T cannot be correct.

This form of argument is clearly valid. Its general form is P iff Q; not-Q; therefore not-P. Here is a specific example:

Argument 4c1. Classical Utilitarianism can be correct iff consequences are all that matter in

morality.2. It s not the case that consequences are all that matter in morality3. Therefore, Classical Utilitarianism can not be correct

ExplanationTake promise keeping. It might well be argued that a promise should be kept even though the consequences may not matter. A rich man may help me out with a few pounds after I promise to pay him back when I’m ‘back on my feet’. If I fail to keep this promise, it is not going to have a bad effect on my benefactor because he’s got more money than he knows what to do with. (He may even have forgotten forever that he loaned me the money.) On the other hand, paying it back may involve some sacrifice to me even if I am in some position to do it. So, there will be no harm done to him if I fail to keep my promise and at least some benefit to me.

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Yet, our intuition may well be that the promise should be kept all the same – regardless of the consequences. It seems part of the very nature of a promise that it should (when possible, of course) be kept. The consequences of keeping it or failing to keep it may not matter.

ResponsesWhat we have been considering so far is Classical Utilitarianism. (It is sometimes called ‘Act Utilitarianism’ because it focuses on individual acts.) In doing this we have seen that it leaves itself open to the two kinds of objection we have seen in the Arguments above. A more sophisticated version of the theory is ‘Rule Utilitarianism’. Here the focus is on the consequences of adopting general rules rather than on individual acts. Think how this new approach may be employed in response to the cases discussed above.

It might be thought that the consequences of breaking or keeping promises do matter, even though in individual cases they may not always seem to. A Rule Utilitarian would say that on the whole the consequences of keeping promises are better (i.e., result in happier people) than the consequences of breaking promises. For one thing, we could all end up feeling we could trust each other far more. The world would be an easier place to get along in if people kept their promises. Likewise, the consequences of living in a world in which perfectly healthy people could be whisked off and have organs forcibly removed to give to the sick and dying may well be quite horrendous. So, under Rule Utilitarianism we do need general rules for our guidance because an adherence to these rules tends towards the enhancement of human happiness.

But this does not end the utilitarian's problems. For one thing, actual rules would have to be specified in such great detail, it is hard to see how one could avoid taking each occasion on its own merits, for no two occasions could ever be realistically expected to be relevantly identical. (This is a problem for specifying general moral rules anyway.) Also we have the problem of what to do when we encounter two conflicting rules. All this points to the danger of rule utilitarianism collapsing into act utilitarianism. On occasions when there was no conflict between the rules, both forms of utilitarianism would lead us to the same conclusion; on occasions when there was conflict, we would have to consider each act on its own merits. This would be to fall back on Act Utilitarianism and we would still face the same old problems.

Secondly, even if the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism can hold, it might still be thought to be unduly optimistic to suppose that following utility-maximising rules will always accord with our intuitions about protecting the weak and vulnerable, and so on. As the philosopher Bernard Williams has put it, the assurance that justice would prevail [in following utilitarian rules], 'is a tribute to the decency and imagination of those utilitarians but not [a tribute] to [either] their consistency or utilitarianism'.

Finally, there is something even more damaging to the utilitarian case - even if we waive the first two objections. The point is the one we have encountered earlier - that of getting things the wrong way around. Even if rule utilitarianism could be relied upon always to deliver the best and most decent recommendation as to how to act (a rather large assumption), it would get there for the wrong reasons. For example, on the rule utilitarian view, the wrong done in, say, discriminating against a minority, or in dismembering an innocent hospital visitor consists in something like the public fear that such things would engender. But isn't this just absurd. It is true that that the public effect would be regrettable, perhaps even catastrophic. This would be at least one reason not to do such things, but it hardly seems to address the source of the real evil of such acts, for that seems to lie in the wrong done to the individuals concerned in each case. Dismembering a healthy visitor as he entered a hospital is evil not because of the fear this would engender in others but because it would kill the visitor.

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Now some utilitarians would agree with these arguments but they would wish to rescue their utilitarianism in another way. Utilitarianism, they say, is not basically a DECISION MAKING PROCEDURE at all (though it may sometimes provide one): decisions should, as the examples have shown, often be taken on non-utilitarian grounds. But that doesn't matter they say, for Utilitarianism, properly characterised, is really a STANDARD OF RIGHTNESS. What defines utilitarianism is the claim that the right act is the one which does maximise utility. It remains an open question as to how we should do it - and we answer that question precisely by looking at the consequences of doing so. Very often, we would in fact maximise utility by following what we may think of as an un-utilitarian rule. This is ‘Indirect Utilitarianism’.

But does this really answer our previous objection? It is possible that a utilitarian standard of rightness may well suggest that we do not adopt a utilitarian decision making procedure on a particular occasion. If so, we can all agree that certain preferences (ones we might consider nasty) should not be counted when we are adding up the things to maximise utility. But isn't this just getting things the wrong way round again? For the indirect utilitarian, they are not to be counted because they would be counter-productive and have bad general effects. Yet ordinarily we do not count those sort of preferences for the quite different reason that we can see that they are wrong from the start.

The indirect utilitarian says, in effect, that we are often forced (by the examples we have given) to adopt non-utilitarian decision making procedures because it is often these procedures that maximise utility, but it is still the maximisation of utility which is the standard of rightness we are trying to follow. But couldn't we suggest with greater force that the reason why we adopt non-utilitarian decision-making procedures is because we adopt some equally non-utilitarian standard of rightness to start off with?

Even in the teeth of powerful objections a philosophy can continue to be defended by sufficiently imaginative and robust adherents. Utilitarianism is like this. It is by no means a philosophical dead duck. Indeed, it continues to inspire great loyalty, and as objections are faced up to, newer, more ingenious ways are found of showing how the theory may be seen as surviving - distant as some of the defences are from the original theory.

The focus on increasing happiness, however, introduces further problems. First, happiness seems to be a very elusive state. What is happiness? We tend to know when we are not happy and take it somewhat for granted when we are. How do we get to be happy if we are not? What makes us happy? Are the things that make me happy the very same things that make you, or Tom, Dick and Harry happy? Do we always know what we need to ensure our own happiness let alone the happiness of others? And should all pleasures count equally? Or should we rank some more highly than others? Further, how on earth are we supposed to measure happiness? If I win £2m on the National Lottery will I be twice as happy as I would have been had I only won £1m? We may occasionally be able to make some rough comparisons. I might be a bit happier than you about this or that. Beyond that, the prospect of a precise (or, for that matter, even remotely useful) measurement of happiness seems slim indeed. Yet, wouldn’t we need some reasonably well-agreed method of calculation in order to sustain Utilitarianism – of any stripe?

One way in which Utilitarians have sought to overcome the elusiveness of happiness is to say that what we should focus on is not the promotion of happiness (because we don’t know how to do it) but instead the elimination of misery and pain (which we have a much better idea how to do). This we call ‘Negative Utilitarianism’. I may not really have any more than the foggiest idea of what to do to make you happier than you are but if you are hungry, cold and naked (and plainly miserable because of all this) and I feed and clothe you and stick you near a warming fire, then I can be sure that I will be eliminating at least some of your misery. If I then help you find a job and a decent place of your own to stay, I may be sure that I’m eliminating even more. This may be a better route to go down but can we really eliminate

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happiness and general well being from our moral considerations? After all, I could get rid of any upset you may currently be experiencing by killing you. Do you want me to? Indeed, one guaranteed effective way of eliminating all misery, pain and sorrow would be to wipe out the human race entirely. Would it therefore be moral to let loose in the world some undefeatable ‘super-bug’? Are terrorists, suicide-bombers, warmongers and murderers really the most moral of people after all?

Points for Discussion

1. If you think like a Utilitarian and consider (a) the promotion of happiness as being the good thing to do and (b) that on a particular occasion it would definitely increase happiness to break a promise, is Rule Utilitarianism nothing more than a disingenuous ‘get-out’ designed purely for pandering to intuitions about promise keeping? Why not bite the bullet and say that it is good to just break this particular promise, even though you may keep others when the consequences of doing so do matter?

2. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) did invent what he called a ‘felicific calculus’ whereby we could (he thought) weigh degrees of happiness (based on intensity, duration, its disposition to lead on to other pleasures, and so on). Further, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) distinguished between ‘higher’ and ‘lower pleasures’, giving greater weight to the former. But can any of this help? Could Bentham’s method be refined even sufficiently to make it remotely useful to our moral guidance (never mind warrant our calling it a ‘calculus’)?

3. Could Negative Utilitarianism be reformulated in order to avoid the consequences discussed above?

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Normative Ethics: Deontology

Argument 5

The central figure in Deontological ethical theory is the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) a highly significant and very difficult figure in the history of the subject. The first key thought is this: to know whether a person acts morally, you have to know about their intention. It is no good just looking at the consequences. One may act so as to produce pleasing consequences and yet fail to act morally and you may act morally even if the consequences happen to turn out badly. This seems to accord with an intuition we have in judging such matters. When we wish to enquire whether a person acted well, we often want to know why the person did what they did.

A second key thought in Kantian ethics is that the agent’s feelings in acting this or that way must be irrelevant. If I give money to a down-and-out in the street because I feel sorry for him, I am not necessarily acting morally. Certainly I am not acting morally if I act from some thought (hope) of being rewarded. (Even if the reward I hope for is that of being accepted as a good person.)

We might readily concede the first of these conditions, but why accept the second? Why should feelings be beside the point? If I give out of compassion, for example, it seems intuitively false to judge that this means I cannot be acting morally. How can feelings of compassion be irrelevant to such a judgement?

To see why, we have to grasp the following argument:

Argument 5a1. We have the control over ourselves to act morally2. We cannot have control over either all the consequences of our actions or our

feelings3. Therefore, consequences and feelings cannot be central to acting morally

ExplanationActing morally is open to us all; it is something we can all do. Yet, clearly, we cannot control the consequences of our actions because unexpected and unpredictable intervening events may thwart our good intentions. In any event, we simply cannot calculate what all the (important) consequences of our act may be. I may donate a kidney to a man I do not know. As a result of the newness of life I have helped him to gain, he may go out and continue his career as the clever mass-murderer who has always eluded the police. As for feelings, they seem notoriously fickle. They may differ from person to person and in any one person from time to time. So, we have another way of putting the above argument:

Argument 5b1. If acting morally depended crucially on either consequences or feelings it would

make acting morally very much a matter of chance and sheer luck.2. Acting morally cannot be a matter of luck or chance.3. Therefore, acting morally cannot depend on consequences or feelings.

What then is important to acting morally? Kant’s answer is: acting out of duty – duty to the moral law. Here we encounter a third key thought – universalisability. A moral rule or maxim must be one that everyone can follow. Otherwise, how could it be true that we could all act morally? (Again we cannot be sure about all the consequences or enjoy the same feelings.) A moral maxim has to hold for all people in similar conditions. If it’s wrong for you to steal this item under these circumstances, it must be wrong for me to do so, or, indeed, for

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anyone else. Moral rules are rules that should always be followed in order to count as moral rules.

Kant looked upon morality as an organised body of such universally applicable maxims. He called these maxims categorical imperatives. Imperatives are things you must do. There are, however, two kinds. First we have what Kant calls the ‘hypothetical imperatives’. These are rules you must follow if you want to increase the possibility of obtaining certain outcomes. For example: ‘if you badly want that job, make sure your CV is in good order’. A categorical imperative is a rule that one must follow regardless of any other consideration. For example: ‘you must never kill’. Of all categorical imperatives, one stands out as basic – it is The Categorical Imperative: ‘Act only on maxims which you can at the same time want to be universal laws’. This is a consequence of the universalisability condition.

It is important to understand that, although universalisability is integral to acting morally, it isn’t entirely definitive of it. We can universalise a great many rules, for example, ‘thou ought to wear matching socks’, but clearly such matters have no connection with morality. Another way of looking at the Categorical Imperative is to see it as a version of the ‘golden rule’ of Christianity, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’.

Try to universalise some things, though, and trouble soon accumulates. Try to universalise lying or stealing, for example. The rule ‘always lie and steal’, for example, motivates the question, ‘What if everyone did just that?’ Any clear answer would have to infringe The Categorical Imperative. We simply cannot (rationally) will such a rule to become a universal law.

Where does the irrationality come from? Kant maintains that there is self-contradiction in a maxim that cannot be universalised. ‘Some actions are so constituted that their maxim cannot even be conceived as a universal law . . . without contradiction.’ (Kant, 1983, [1785] Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, pp86-7) Take Kant’s example of promising. One borrows money, promising to pay it back yet knowing that this will never be possible. It is a false promise. Where does the contradiction lie? In order for one’s promise to taken as a promise it has to be believed. If such belief is undermined then so-called promises couldn’t be taken as promises. This would mean that promise making was impossible. Now imagine such false-promises being universalised. We would then live in a world in which nobody could rationally believe that a (genuine) promise was actually being made. The contradiction is this: you are willing a world in which your promise is taken as such but at the same time willing a world in which it couldn’t (rationally) be taken as a promise. In universalising a world of false promises, you are willing a world in which the very concept of a promise could not exist.

ResponsesFirst we must respond to Kant’s charge of contradiction. This may work in the case of false-promise making. But it doesn’t seem to cover all cases. Take murder. I murder someone because they have annoyed me. I thus will a world in which murder to avoid further annoyance is taken as being just fine. No doubt such a world would be terribly unstable but it is hard to see a contradiction here. Willing a world of murder is not to will a world in which murder is impossible. It isn’t like the example of promise making. What also of the case of committing suicide? Of course, willing that we all do it is willing a world in which the species Homo Sapiens will cease to exist. This may be a really bad idea but there is no contradiction involved.

Note that the kind of contradiction we have been employing is logical contradiction. The maker of false promises is willing a world in which promise making is both possible and impossible. It is logically impossible for such a world to exist. Thus, making false promises cannot be universalised. This is a very strong interpretation of what Kant meant by saying that a contradiction is involved. We have seen that this is so strict a way of looking at matters that

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we can happily will all sorts of (intuitively) immoral actions being made universal law without contradiction.

Weaker kinds of contradiction have been invoked in interpreting Kant in order that cases other than false-promise making can be ruled out in the process of willing them as universal law. One such weaker form is that of the ‘teleological contradiction’. Teleology involves thinking about the purposes of things. A teleological contradiction would occur if, in universalising some maxim, we willed something which would go against the purpose of the very thing we are universalising. So, false promise making goes against the very purpose of promise making. A second weaker form of contradiction is the ‘practical contradiction’. In the example of making a false promise in order to obtain money, our practical aim is to get money from a person. Yet to universalise this practice is to will a world in which the practice of promise making cannot work and, thus, a world in which obtaining money by such means was impossible. While these work against false-promise making, however, it is less clear that they work in other cases. There is no clear case for the view that acting immorally is always to be irrational in the sense that one necessarily invokes self-contradiction (of any sort).

Moral rules, under Kant, hold without thought of the consequences, so ‘You ought not to lie’, for example, has to be exceptionless. So, it seems that if an axe-wielding homicidal maniac knocks on your door in pursuance of his victim (whom you are hiding) you should not lie about the victim’s whereabouts. Kant actually considers this sort of case and defends his view that we should not lie but his defence rests on speculation as to the consequences of one’s actions. This sits uncomfortably with his view that consequences are not relevant morally. In any event we may question whether consequences are altogether irrelevant. We may also question whether emotions are really beside the point. If you act out of compassion or friendship instead of from a sense of duty to the ‘moral law’, are you really preventing yourself from acting morally? Isn’t compassion morally praiseworthy?

Points for Discussion

1. Given the similarity between Kant’s Categorical Imperative and the central tenet of Christian ethics, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, do you think that Christ was a deontological ethicist?

2. Could either the ‘teleological’ or ‘practical’ conception of contradiction work against willing that we should all commit suicide, theft or murder? Say the suicide is acting out of concern for self (wanting to eliminate his misery). Say also that the purpose of acting out of self-concern is self-preservation. Then the suicide seems to be willing a world in which both death and self-preservation are universal purposes. You cannot will both. But could the suicide simply reject self-preservation?

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Normative Ethics: Virtue Ethics

Argument 6

Compare these two short lists:1. Do not kill2. Do not kill without good reason3. Do help those in distress4. Do help those in distress unless doing so would bring unreasonable harm on others

1. Kindness2. Charity3. Moral sensitivity4. Courage*

The first is a list of moral rules; the second is a list of what we call the moral virtues. Notice the second and fourth items in the list of rules: they are there to remind us that moral rules nearly always seem to require qualification to fit particular circumstances. It may be good (in general) not to lie but if doing so were the only way to save a life, one may think twice. On the other hand, it seems easier to state virtues without qualification (though not easy to give a completed and incontestable list) Virtue Ethics is an approach to normative ethics that emphasises the primacy of the virtues. It is an approach that goes back to the ancient Greeks – most notably, Aristotle – but had largely been ignored in Ethics in modern times as Deontology and Utilitarianism have tended to dominate the scene. More recently it has been revived and nowadays commands considerable respect as a third and quite distinct approach. One of the earlier modern exponents of this view was the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919-2001). Her argument – in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (1958) - concluded that we should rid ourselves of the notions of moral duty and obligation. There is no useful work that these notions can do. She noted that Aristotle did important work in ethics with scarcely any notion of ‘The Moral’ in the sense imposed by Deontology and Utilitarianism. Summarising matters, her argument runs thus:

Argument 6a1. The notions of moral duty and obligations only make sense in the context of a

(moral) law-giver (God, say).2. Morality is possible without a (moral) law-giver.3. So, morality is possible without the notions of moral duty and obligation.

What we have instead is the notion of the virtue – and that should be what takes centre-stage. Take the following argument:

Argument 6b1. What makes us good is determined by the kind of people we are and our

relations with others.2. The kind of people we are and our relations with others are determined by our

characters (i.e., by the virtues we possess).3. So, what makes us good is determined by the virtues we possess.

ResponseA believer in God may want to deny (2) (in Arg 6a) or (perhaps more sensibly) discern a different role for God in our moral framework. (For example, God may not so much ‘lay down the law’ as wish us to be people of a certain kind, that is, persons with certain kinds of virtue.)

* The four so called ‘Cardinal Virtues’, which go back to ancient times are; prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude. Christianity added: love, hope and charity.

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A Comparison of the Three Approaches to Normative Ethics

Utilitarianism Deontology Virtue Ethics

Irreducible Starting Point

States of AffairsConequences

Duty Notion of Morally Good Person(not defined in terms of:duty or tendency to maximise utility)

Focus on Ways of DoingAct AppraisalDecision ProceduresDiscrete ActsMoral quandaries

Ways of DoingAct AppraisalDecision ProceduresDiscrete ActsMoral quandaries

Ways of BeingAgent AppraisalGood characterDisposition to ongoing long-term patterns of actionLiving well (Eudemonia)

Motivation For the sake of: Utility MaximisationDisposition to do this

For the sake of: Duty

For the sake of: Virtue

Primary Object of Moral Evaluation

States of AffairsConsequences

Moral LawDegree of accordance with this

The AgentPersonsThe Will

Concept of Good Defined in terms of:States of affairsConsequencesUtility Maximisation

Defined in terms of:Right ActionRight action for its own sake

Defined in terms of:The AgentThe will is the only properly good thing.

Concept of Virtue Defined in terms of:Tendency toUtility Maximisation

Defined in terms of:Acting in accordance with moral Rules

Defined in terms of:Character Trait that a person needs to flourish / live well

A Virtuous Agent is one who

Acts so as to:Maximise Utility

Acts in accordance with moral Rules

Exercises the Virtues

Concept of Duty Defined in terms of:Utility Maximisation

Defined in terms of:Acting in accordance with Moral Rules

Defined in terms of:Acting in accordance with the Virtues

Concept of Right Acts

Defined in terms of: accordance withUtility Maximisation

Defined in terms of:accordance withThe Moral Law

Defined in terms of:What a virtuous agent would do

A Correct Moral Rule is one that

Maximises Utility a is laid upon by Godb is required by Natural Lawc is rationally required

a virtuous agent would do under the circumstances

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Problems of VE as Compared to Other Two Approaches and Some VE Responses

The Problem of JustificationWe need to have an independent account of human flourishing but no such account seems to work: if we define flourishing in terms of the virtues we simply beg the question in favour of the virtues. Response: All theories rely on some basic moral intuitions which are not, and cannot be, proved, and which are taken by the theory as self-evident.

The Problem of UniversalityThe lack of any universal criterion for deciding between different conceptions of the virtues implies that there are no restraints on the virtues VE might recommend. Moreover, not only does VE allow us to be content with our ‘local virtues’, ugly as they might be, it suggests that we build our entire ethical view upon them. Response: This is no less a problem for rule-based theories.

The Problem of Action GuidanceVE cannot possibly guide action. Response: The agent may be led to ask `If I were to do such and such now, would I be acting justly or unjustly (or neither), kindly or unkindly [and so on]?' This willingness to reflect is all that is needed.

The Problem of ReductionismVE defines all of our moral concepts in terms of the virtuous agent. Response: VE not committed to any sort of reductionism involving defining all of our moral concepts in terms of the virtuous agent. On the contrary, it relies on a lot of very significant moral concepts – e.g. charity or benevolence.

The Problems of Moral Scepticism and Moral PluralismWe may not know which character traits are the virtues. In different cultures we may encounter different opinions. Response: Again, this is no less a problem for rule-based theories. (Whose rules are the rules?)

The Problem of Eudaimonia (Roughly ‘Living Well’)The concept of Eudemonia is hopelessly obscure. Response: Deontology and utilitarianism share obscurity of central concepts - rationality and happiness.

The Problem of CircularityVE says that right action is what the virtuous agent does and then says that what makes an agent virtuous is that he or she performs the right action. Response: The theory is not trivially circular; it does not specify right action in terms of the virtuous agent and then immediately specify the virtuous agent in terms of right action. Rather, it specifies the virtuous agent in terms of the virtues, and then specifies these, not merely as dispositions to right action, but as the character traits required for eudaimonia.

The Problem of Unresolvable ConflictThe requirements of the virtues can conflict. Response: The requirements of rules can also conflict.

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Generosity: An Example of a Conceptual Analysis of a VirtueGenerosity is a virtue but what is involved in the having of it? For a Virtue ethicist, to ‘act from’ a virtue means more than merely acting in accordance with that virtue (as though following a rule) for this ignores a crucial causal element. Fundamentally, one must be in a virtuous state and this state must (in large part) be what motivates the behaviour. However, it seems plausible also to suggest a number of crucial extra conditions. Following Audi (Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977) one may isolate six conditions in all – the general features involved in virtuous action:

1. The Field: range of matters / things the virtue is concerned with or what situations call for that virtue.

2. The Target: what the virtuous action hopes to achieve.3. The Agent’s Understanding: of the field4. The Agent’s Motivation: for performing the action5. The Agent’s Action: being based on that motivation6. The Beneficiaries: who they should be

In an article on caring, Van Hooft (‘Acting from the virtue of caring in nursing’, Nursing Ethics, vol.6, no.3, London: Arnold, 1999, pp.189-201) remembering that Aristotle thought that a virtuous person should feel right in performing the action, adds:

7. The Agent’s feeling Appropriate Emotions / inclinations: in relation to the field.

Van Hooft includes within the 7th condition the following condition which I will separate.

8. The Emotion should be felt to the right Degree.

He then adds a further condition:

9. A Preparedness of the Agent to Reflect: on what they are doing / have done. (Leaving room for a sense of integrity.)

One can see in this the spirit of Aristotle insofar as a number of these conditions suggest that acting from a virtue involves acting from knowledge, choice and (fairly long-standing) dispositions of character.

Armed with our conceptual framework, we can now locate the concept of generosity within it. First, its field? Generosity is aimed at other people. Also, crucially, our act will involve some expenditure on our part – of time, money, attention and even some giving of self. Virtues typically test our characters; generosity tests us because it involves sharing some our own resources with others. This is not to deny that some people may be able to exercise virtues perfectly and without effort. The overwhelming majority of us fall short of this, of course, and even those with perfect virtue may have come to be so after extensive and very hard training. Most of us seem to fall somewhere between akrasia (weakness of will) and enkrateia (strength of will). In the former case, the agent typically fails to do what they accept they ought to do; in the latter case, the agent typically does it, but still has to expend effort in the process. The situations will be occasions in which there is a perceived need of ‘the other’ and the capability of ‘the self’ to offer some service. Further, the wanted consequence should be connected to the (perceived) benefit of the recipient: it should be thought that the act does them genuine good. We might, for instance, make a long-lost or newfound friend feel welcome and wanted. We wish our beneficiaries to feel as though they are worthy of being made more comfortable, of having a specific lack made good or, perhaps worthy of just a ‘bit of a fuss’. This provides the target of the virtue: one has been generous to the extent that one’s actions have been directed upon the aim of acknowledging the value of the other (whether or not it is appreciated).

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What then must the agent understand? It seems plausible to suggest that the agent have some grasp of how ‘the other’ is supposed to benefit and of the wider significance of the benefit. Arms manufacturers fail to be generous if they give an extra big discount to the bullet-spitting dictator of a third-world country (and not just because the manufacturer hopes to gain future custom). A rich father, who continues to give money to a spendthrift son, acts too foolishly to be generous. This brings us to the question of just who the beneficiaries should be. The suggestion is - others who merit the generosity. There must be the reasonable possibility of benefit and the reasonable expectation of its not being abused: blind or cynical giving is not generous giving.

What of the agent’s motivation? If the agent expects some personal return in giving they are hardly being generous. Of course, the agent may (quite legitimately) feel good in acting generously. All that shows (not unimportantly) is that there exists a link between the virtuous life and a feeling of well-being. Moreover, feeling that one is ‘doing as one would be done by’ may not be inappropriate. However, if an agent spends some time with his ageing and rich aunt as she lies in her death bed simply because he expects as a result to receive extra benefit in her will, he would scarcely rank as generous: selfish giving is not generous giving. The agent’s action has to be motivated in the right kind of way. His action should be appropriately motivated. This amounts to its being driven by appropriate reasons and emotions. Feelings of care and concern suggest themselves as candidates. The agent may perceive a need (as in, say, being generous to a charity) or perceive that the act would show ‘the other’ to have value (as in, say, generously feeding a long-lost friend).

Moreover the emotions need to be felt to the right degree. This may vary, for it is possible to act generously out of habit – that is, under conditions in which emotions are likely to be minimal. This possibility does not make the emotions irrelevant, for the habit (if it is genuinely to be one of generosity) will have to have been formed under conditions in which emotion had a higher profile role to play. (Think of the child being persuaded to share.) Habit, we may say, doesn’t void the role of emotions, it simply allows emotion a more assured place in the system of motivation; emotions come to motivate as much out of default as intensity. The emotions, then, may never be totally absent but perhaps they mustn’t be permitted too large, or unconstrained a role either. Intense emotion may get in the way; good judgement is often cool judgement.

Points for Discussion

1. Can Anscombe be right in saying that we can give up the notion of moral obligation?

2. Can there be a single set of virtues for every human being?

3. Is being virtuous necessary for happiness?

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Practical Ethics: Abortion contents

Argument 7

Abortion is one of the major moral issues of the day. One reason for this may be that abortion, under some circumstances, is legal: abortion is actually practised. This gives those who speak against it an extra reason to be passionate about the issue, and not infrequently vehement.

The main argument against abortion is:

Argument 7a 1. The deliberate killing of an innocent human being is wrong.2. Abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.3. Therefore, abortion is wrong.

ResponsesThere are two possible responses to this. First one may wish to argue that although abortion is the killing of an innocent human being, it may still be justified on occasion. The second response is to deny that abortion is killing an innocent human being. We will consider these in turn.

Can We Justify Killing the Innocent Human Being?

Argument 7b1 We should always cut down on evil (Recall Negative Utilitarianism.)2 To have laws prohibiting abortion under any circumstances simply drives the

practice underground. This, in turn, increases the risk of dangers to health which arise from old wives tales and 'back street' practitioners. It is also an open invitation to those who would wish to exploit the situation for their own financial gain. Make abortion legal, at least under some carefully prescribed circumstances, and you cut down on these evils.

4 Therefore abortion should be made legal.

ResponsesThe problem is that although it shows that we cannot prohibit abortion without suffering the consequence of other evils, it does not show that abortion itself is not an evil. If the foetus has a right to life, then we cannot kill it with impunity just because having a law protecting it from such an ultimate abuse causes difficulty elsewhere. This argument, therefore, does not even address the ethics of abortion itself.

A second argument maintains that it is no business of the law to interfere in such matters as abortion. This is an area of private morality. Peter Singer, a well-known philosophical writer in practical ethics, claims that this attitude can be traced to a principle expounded by the great 19th. Century defender of Liberalism, John Stuart Mill, who wrote, ". . . the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others . . . He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right.” ('On Liberty')

This principle (which Mill did not specifically intend as an argument in favour of abortion) is often brought to bear on debates concerning the repeal of victim-less crimes. It was popular for instance among those who thought that homosexuality should not be a matter for the law.

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Argument 7c1. Victimless acts should not be criminalized.2. Abortion is a victimless act.3. Therefore, abortion should not be criminalized.

ResponsesThe trouble with this is that one may wholeheartedly accept Mill's principle and still think that it has no relevance to the issue of abortion, for it simply begs the question to assume that abortion is victim-less. Anti-abortionists are ready to point to an all too obvious victim - the foetus itself. To kill the foetus is to do it the greatest harm possible, so the power of the law may well be rightfully exercised in preventing people from having abortion. The point here is that if the foetus has a right to life, then it is just as much the law's business to protect that, as it is the law's business to protect the right to life of the rest of us.

A third argument points to the rights of the pregnant woman herself.

Argument 7d1. The woman, so this position goes, has the right to determine what she does with

her own body and what goes on inside it.2. Abortion is just such a matter.3. Therefore, the woman has the right to determine whether she has an abortion.

This argument has been popular with the feminist movement. Its proponents are keen to make us aware that for too long what happens to women and what they may do has been controlled by male dominated ideologies and that it is high time that women determined things for themselves.

ResponsesIt may be pointed out that abortion isn't just like plastic surgery. True, the foetus is inside the woman's body, but why should that matter? Does it still not have its own rights? But now consider the following argument. It comes from an American philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson. The argument employs an ingenious analogy

Suppose you wake up one morning finding yourself in a hospital bed. You are connected up to a person in the next bed. You are told that this person is a famous violinist with kidney disease. The only way he can survive is for his system to be connected up with someone else's, someone of the right blood type and so on. A society of music lovers kidnapped you and had the necessary operation performed and - there you are. Further, imagine that all you have to do to extricate yourself from this situation is to tell the doctors that you do not wish to continue. They will then disconnect you and send you home. Of course, if you do this, the violinist will die. Alternatively, if you elect to stay put for nine months, the violinist will recover and be able to go his own way.

The more amusingly implausible aspects of this tale are not, of course, important. What does matter is that someone else depends upon you for their survival in a way which seems analogous to the way in which a foetus depends on the woman for its survival. Yet, so the thought continues, you could hardly be morally required to let the violinist go on using your kidneys in this way. It may be kind of you to let this happen, but it's your body, your life, and your decision. You cannot be morally condemned for deciding that the priorities of your life rest elsewhere, even though the violinist would die as a result.

The important conclusion here is that we may concede that the violinist has a right to life, but the point is that this does not entail that he has the right to use another's body to stay alive. Is the pregnant woman in the same sort of position? If so, then even given that the foetus has a

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right to life, and even given that to abort it would be to bring about the death of an innocent human being, it does not have this right at the expense of using another's (the woman's) body.

A clear problem with this fanciful analogy is that it depends upon something happening to you without your permission - you were kidnapped after all. Most pregnancies are not the result of anything analogous to kidnap, even if many result from accident. However, it is hardly clear that if you deliberately volunteered to aid the violinist in this way that you would not, from that point on, be morally obliged to continue. Similarly, getting yourself deliberately pregnant does not obviously mean that you are free from obligations to the resulting foetus.

It may be pointed out that some pregnancies are analogous to the kidnap case - those resulting from rape, for instance. Doesn't the woman, under these circumstances, have her rights, independent of those of the foetus?

But does she have the right to kill the foetus? It may seem to some that she has, but consider the following points. Lots of things happen to us in life which we do not deliberately ask for; life is just like that. We may sometimes find ourselves in circumstances that are not of our own design or choosing. This happens even to those who make the most fastidious and exhaustive plans. It does not follow that, once those circumstances have come about, they do not place one under certain moral obligations.

An interesting example of the sort of thing intended here was played out a few years ago in the popular, long running radio soap-opera 'The Archers'. Phil and Jill Archer have found squatters in the cottage they hire out as holiday accommodation. They did not invite them in. They were outraged. They have their rights. Yet they know, especially Jill Archer, that to turf them out would, under the special circumstances of the case, be an awful thing to do. The squatters have a baby and it would suffer. The man is, apparently, an honest worker, but there is just no other accommodation near enough to his place of work. The woman is not just some couldn't-care-less druggy, but a decent sort down on her luck in our cruel materialistic society. She keeps the place clean.

It isn't stunningly obvious that, even in this case, the Archers are not under any obligation to help. Indeed, a utilitarian, keen upon maximising well-being, may well conclude that they should just be allowed to stay there as things stand. Letting them stay, crudely, results in a greater degree of well-being than kicking them out.

But one doesn't have to be a utilitarian. There is a conflict of rights at work here. The Archers clearly have a right to a free use of their own property. But people also have a right not to be rendered homeless, especially without further ado. In our society we have traditionally put greater weight on rights of property. It is, however, an open question whether other rights can be morally more important.

There are two problems at play in all this. First, when we start to consider cases in which there is a conflict of rights, it is not always obvious what weight we should give to each side. Utilitarians can carry out their calculations of utility, others need further argument.

A second problem is that moral obligation, if we have it at all, can come even when we didn't ask for it. The victim of rape is, of course, devastated to an incalculably greater degree. Indeed, the rest of us feel anger and outrage on her behalf, as well as sympathy. We feel that she should be given all the support that can be mustered.

Even so, it is not obvious that she has absolutely no moral obligation to see the pregnancy through. (It is, of course a further question as to whether she owes further obligations to the child once it is born.) In general however, that one is brought into a situation against one's choice does not, at least obviously, entail that one is free from the kinds of obligations that

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normally go with that situation, however sorry we may feel for ourselves. It is not clear that moral obligations are the sorts of things, if they exist at all, that only come when deliberately invited.

So far we have made the pro-abortionist case seem to rest on very shaky ground. We must now see if it can be strengthened.

Is The Foetus Really A Person?We may here wish, of course, to acknowledge that the foetus is not really a person, in the way that you and I are, but that even a living non-person may well have a right to life. Plenty of people think, for instance, that animals have this right. Many anti-abortionists, however, seem to rely on what we may call 'The Argument from Potential'. That means that they share the view that it is being a person which confers value on a being to the point at which it has an inalienable right to life, and also agree that the foetus is not actually a person but maintain that one should never abort a foetus because it is a potential person.

Argument 7e1. Killing a potential person is wrong.2. Abortion is killing a potential person.3. Therefore abortion is wrong.

ResponsesNow what this argument is doing is saying that abortion is wrong because it will result in the non-existence of a future person. This is tantamount to saying that the foetus has no present intrinsic value all its own; what really has the value is the future person. The foetus matters not for what it is but for what it will become.

The trouble with this argument is that it would seem equally to require the prohibition of any necessary stage in the process of producing a future person. Contraception, for instance, prevents the existence of future persons. Is this really wrong on this ground? Worse, males and females just not 'getting together' also prevents the existence of future human beings. Indeed, refraining from constant copulation at every free moment prevents many millions of future human beings from coming into existence. Is this wrong?

One obvious response to this is that a foetus is a potential person that has already got started - so abortion is morally worse than, say, contraception: abortion kills something on its way; contraception merely prevents something coming about in the first place.

Now there may be any number of ways in which preventing possible outcomes is morally quite different to stopping something already under-way, but the problem with taking this line is that, if it is the losing of the future person that is essentially what we wish to avoid, then it is hard to see why putting a stop to the process of making that person at one stage should be morally different to stopping it at any other. Jonathan Glover has a nice way of putting this, saying that, if it is the future cake we are really valuing, it is just as much a pity if the ingredients are not brought together in the first place as it is if they are thrown away after mixing. ('Causing Death and Saving Lives', p.122)

If we are to reserve for abortion some special moral disapproval it had better be because we value the foetus as it is, not just as something with potential. After all, don't we (oughtn't we) to value our living children just as they are now, and not just because they may grow up into useful members of society?

But why value the foetus just for what it is now? Can its value lie in its being an actual person? When, however, does the foetus become an actual person? The trouble all this gets us into is that we do not just become persons at some obviously specifiable stage.

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In one sense, of course, it is clear that the foetus simply is human. But what we really want to know is whether it is to count as a person. This may just seem to follow, but the notion of what it is that makes something a person can come adrift from its exclusive ties to the human species. What if we came across some strange species in space, for example? (Think of some 'Star Trek' style future here). These creatures, let us assume, have an alien culture - they look and sound quite unlike us. Further study, however, reveals that they are intelligent, reflective beings who lead an organised social life, have an advanced language and live by a well established moral code. They can experience joy and pain and have sophisticated aesthetic sensibilities. Eventually, we come to enjoy a rich and mutually rewarding relationship with them (if not one entirely free from the tension which inevitably arises from cultural difference). Would we then deny these creatures status as persons? Surely a more decent position would be to say we have discovered non-human persons.

The point of this story is twofold. Firstly, it reminds us that it is being a person that is fundamentally valuable, not being a member of this or that species. Secondly, it provides us with reason to believe that what it is that makes us persons cannot be the mere fact of our humanity - humanity, that is, in the sense of having the genetic composition of homo-sapiens. Being a person must consist in other qualities. But what other qualities? Well, the sort of things mentioned above would be good candidates, others may follow from a fuller analysis.

The relevance of all this to abortion is clear - the foetus is hardly going to count as a person according to any plausible set of criteria for counting beings as persons. If we think this, we can then say that while it is quite wrong to deliberately kill a person, it is quite another matter to kill a non-person - and the foetus would be a non-person. And we need not suppose that it has no moral rights, only that, being a non-person, its rights cannot take any precedence over the (higher) moral rights of persons - the mother, for instance, who may have good reason for wanting an abortion.

But this may be moving too quickly. A foetus may not be a full-blown person - like you or me - but this does not mean that it might not be a person at all. But when does the foetus become a person? An immediate problem raised by this is that the development of a human being is not a sudden - not-here-one-moment, here-the-next - sort of phenomenon: it takes time and goes through various stages. There are those who are against abortion at any of the stages of development, of course - right back to the very moment following conception. However, revulsion at the thought does seem generally to increase in some rough proportion to the degree of development that has taken place.

Think about the fertilised egg or the zygote (the tiny clump of cells which comes about soon after conception) and perhaps most people would not get too upset at its death. Many zygotes fail to implant themselves in the uterus lining in any case and are naturally aborted. At the other extreme, deliberately abort a far more developed foetus, and a barrage of objections will have to be met.

Pro-abortionists can, therefore, be challenged to point to some magical dividing line which they propose to count as morally significant, such that killing before this stage does not matter as much as killing after it. It is argued that if such a line cannot be drawn, then the foetus must matter. Not that line drawing has never been attempted. Four candidates immediately present themselves - conception, quickening, viability and birth. We will consider these in reverse.

BirthBirth is the most obvious of the dividing lines, and if the pro-abortionists could rest on it, it would make the easiest criterion to live with.

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Argument 7f1. Deliberately kill after the child has been born, and you have committed murder,

kill before birth and you have done nothing wrong. (Though even this would not be to deny that the death of the foetus would not or should not matter to the mother.)

2. Abortion consists in killing before birth.3. Therefore abortion is not wrong.

ResponsesThe moment of birth also marks a great change in our attitudes towards the being - we can now see it, hear it, hold it. (Though, of course, the mother can feel it long before this.) None of this, however, seems to give the moment of birth much importance in the present issue, and it is not one which most pro-abortionists would take seriously.

Why not? The anti-abortionist can here point to the fairly obvious fact that the foetus as it is at the final stages before birth is the very same entity as the baby just after birth. Therefore, given that it would be wrong to kill the latter, it would be equally wrong to kill the former. Indeed, some babies are born prematurely and may be less physically developed than a foetus coming to the end of a normal term, but since we would not deliberately kill the premature child, we had better not kill the near-to-birth foetus. In fact, at this stage, the only major difference between the foetus and baby is that the former is inside the mother and the latter is outside. But who would wish geographical location to be morally significant?

ViabilityViability has been a much stronger candidate as a dividing line, for the moment of viability is the time when the foetus could go on living outside the womb: it allows us to count the foetus and the born child as mattering equally just because both have a significant degree of meaningful life as independent entities. It also overcomes the difficulty presented by premature babies. True, they are out of the womb sooner than others and need special care, but they are viable in the same sense as the well-developed unborn foetus and the born child. Viability has certainly seemed to some as the time that matters. In 1973, the United States Supreme Court made a historic decision which gave viability this special moral status.

Argument 7g1 Deliberately kill after viability, and you have committed murder, kill before this

stage and you have done nothing wrong.2 Abort before this stage is reached and nothing wrong has been done.3 Therefore, killing before this stage is not wrong.

ResponsesInviting as it may be to mark viability as the morally significant dividing line, however, it is hardly obvious why the mere potential for continuing life outside the womb should make such a moral difference. It seems particularly unhelpful to defend the use of viability as the dividing line by pointing (as did the U.S. Supreme Court) to the fact that we are talking about a potential independent human life, for such a potential for this applies also to the non-viable foetus.

A further block on the idea that viability could be a good cut off point is that it seems too dependent upon the technological contingencies of time and place. Is a foetus worth less in a country or at a time in which there is less likelihood of maintaining its survival outside the womb?

It is sometimes suggested that the complete dependence of the foetus upon its mother for survival shows that it has less right to life than a being who enjoys independence. But why should (even total) dependence be crucial here? One of a team of mountaineers may suffer an

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injury and be totally dependent upon his companions for survival, but this hardly shows that he has less right to his life than the others.

QuickeningThis is the moment at which the mother first feels the foetus move - a time of considerable emotional significance. It forces the thought that one is dealing with person, something with at least a bit of a mind of its own, rather than just an inanimate clump of cells. Traditional Catholic theology even maintained that it was at this moment that the foetus gained its soul. If this were really the case, then the moment of quickening would be significant from our present point of view, for to kill before this time would not be to kill a thing with a soul. But this is a highly dubious piece of metaphysics (no longer a part of Catholic doctrine) and hardly a sound basis for justifying abortion. Aside from this, however, it is hard to see why sheer lack of a capacity for independent movement should be relevant to one's right to life. Is someone totally paralysed to have no claim to such a right?

ConceptionOne obvious reason for adopting conception as the essential person producing stage is that it is the time at which the all the necessary genetic ingredients come together. Before this stage there is no single clump of matter which can count as a person.

An equally obvious response to adopting this as the dividing line that matters is that a fertilised egg seems to be quite different from anything remotely resembling a person. If a foetus at any stage is not a full-blown person, the fertilised egg seems to be no kind of person at all. As Glover points out (‘Causing Death and Saving Lives’ p.124), it is no more a person of any kind than an acorn is an oak tree, a caterpillar is a butterfly or a bowl of unbaked ingredients is a cake. If abortion can be morally innocent, then, it would seem that the stages immediately following conception mark out the time, but difficulties remain. Any stage is bound, to some extent, to be arbitrary. Moreover, there are other issues involved. First is the notion of the sanctity of life itself, then there are the side effects of abortion (often quite traumatic). Equally there is the question of the morality of deliberate non-conception and the morality of not having an abortion when severe handicap will result.

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Points for Discussion

1. We can ask whether the foetus is a person. Even if it isn’t (and even given the problems over just regarding it as a potential person) it doesn’t follow that it has no value. We can never comfortably regard the foetus simply as a member of the species homo sapiens. This is to ignore the part the pregnancy plays in our lives. May it not have value – in part – because of this role – the hope, the expectation, the love we have for it? Abortion can never just be a matter of getting rid of a thing. To regard it this way is simply to ignore its intrinsic importance. It would rather be like regarding music as no more than a series of sounds or a painting as blobs of colour.* They are that, but so much more besides. Do you agree? What implications do you think all this has for abortion?

2. The philosopher Michael Tooley in his Abortion and Infanticide (p. 57-85, 1992) has put forward the following argument. (I paraphrase quite heavily.) A person is a being that has a conception of itself. A foetus has no such self-conception, so is not a person and has no serious right to life. (He even thinks that infanticide may be justified under some circumstances – on the same grounds.) How can he be answered?

3. The philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson in her ‘A Defence of Abortion’ (in Singer, P., ed., Applied Ethics, Oxford, 1994) makes use of a science fiction case of ‘person seeds’. These float through the air like pollen. Just now and again they can get into your house (even though houses are screened against them). If they do, they can take root and grow into persons. Thompson argues that the seed can have no such right. She argues that screen failure is analogous to contraception failure – all reasonable precautions have been taken but accidents will happen. How could this be formed into an argument to justify abortion? What is wrong with such an argument? Can such science fiction cases be useful to our grasp of what is at play in the issue? (Philosophers frequently do make use of such scenarios.)

4. The utilitarian Peter Singer thinks that abortion can rarely be condemned. If it increases the happiness in the world to have the foetus aborted – and it might if the woman doesn’t want the child after all – then it should be all right. Remember that the foetus is not a person. Can the utilitarian ignore the fact that if the foetus had been allowed to live, it may have led a life in which the overall happiness was greater than that caused by its being aborted?

5. A utilitarian might say that if the future life of a foetus was likely to be greater misery than pleasure, then abort. If you still want a child, conceive another. This is the Replaceability Thesis. Yet, if the two foetuses are allowed to develop and live the amount of happiness in the world will be greater in total than would be the case if only the second one was allowed to carry on. (See R. Hursthouse, Beginning Lives, Oxford, Blackwell, 1987.) Should a utilitarian concede this? What if the woman only wanted one child? Should a utilitarian think it right to have as many babies as possible? (The more people, the more happiness.)

* The example of the painting I take from Christopher Hamilton, Understanding Philosophy, 2003, p.139.

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Practical Ethics: Voluntary Euthanasia

Argument 8

'Euthanasia' derives from two Greek words meaning 'good death'.

We have a different meaning today.

An American philosopher has provided the following definition and this is the one we shall work with.

" [Voluntary] euthanasia means killing someone - or letting someone die - who is going to die soon anyway, at the person's own request, as an act of kindness."(T. Rachels 'Matters of Life and Death')

There are 4 elements to this definition:

1) A person is going to be killed (or deliberately left to die)2) The person to be killed is going to die soon anyway3) The person asks to be killed4) The killing is done as an act of kindness

Condition (3) ensures that we are dealing with voluntary euthanasia. But note that if this condition is not satisfied, it is not obvious that we would have an act that it was not possible to justify. Non-voluntary Euthanasia, however, is a different area of concern and we will not be dealing with it.

Condition (2) states that the effective life of the person is over with anyway.

Condition (4) covers the fact that if left to live, the person will suffer greatly in some way. It also implies that some relatively painless way be used in the killing. At least it should involve less pain that the death would otherwise involve and should be the least painful method available.

Condition (1), of course, just states the obvious but it is important to note that it says a person is to die, not just a insentient body being kept going on a machine but who no longer exists as a personality. (Someone who is badly injured, for example and whose brain is virtually dead and who cannot be brought around. We will not be covering this.)

This can also be compared to assisted suicide. Although often treated in the same light by the press, Condition (3) would have to be changed to 'helping the person kill themselves' This we will not cover either.

Our question, then, is: 'Can an act which satisfies Conditions (1) to (4) be morally justified?' Note that this is not the same as the question, 'Should such an act be made legal?' It might well (sometimes) be wrong to legalise something even if it can (sometimes) be morally right. In these circumstances, transgressors may be technically guilty yet excused under certain circumstances. It is an open question whether VE should be looked at in this way.

Now Rachels provides an argument for VE as we have defined it. This is called 'The Argument From Mercy'.

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Argument 8a If a person is (a) dying and (b) in the course of dying is suffering from substantial pain and (c) asks us to kill him so that his misery might be ended and (d) that killing is the only way of ending that misery. Then it is not immoral to kill that person.

Rachels quotes from Alsop, a once well-known journalist and a cancer sufferer. "No human being with a spark of pity could let a dying thing suffer so, to no good end." (Note the interesting use of the word 'thing' here.) What the argument does is two things. Firstly, it unpacks Condition (4), what we think makes it an act of kindness. Secondly, it structures many people's intuitions on the subject. Dealing with the first matter, we are now in a position to lay out the conditions necessary for an act of killing to be kind.

(a) we must kill someone (or let someone die)(b) that person must be suffering greatly(c) every other means of relieving the suffering must have been somehow eliminated(d) death must be the only way of relieving the torment.

The argument then states that if these conditions are satisfied it is kind to kill the person and, therefore not morally wrong.

We must note here a couple of things that the argument is not saying. It is not saying that we are entitled to kill a person who is suffering from great pain, just on this ground alone - like shooting a horse with a broken leg - the other conditions are necessary. We must be accelerating a death which is occurring already, at the request of the person himself. So the above argument cannot cover cases in which the sufferer is incapable of conveying their wishes (even if we feel entitled to surmise that these are or would be their wishes). Nor can it apply to cases (if there are any) in which a person is suffering greatly and wants us to end things quickly, if what is causing the pain is not going to kill them anyway: the person does have to be dying already. These observations are important, for it means that the argument may not fit the bill for all those who are for euthanasia. It is a very conservative argument.

What would a Utilitarian think of this argument?In fact Rachel's does look like a Utilitarian argument. Certainly it can be seen as tacitly relying on the following principle:

The moral goodness of an act is to be judged in terms of how far it increases or decreases human misery.

A Utilitarian could frame the argument as follows:

Argument 8b1. An action or social policy which increased happiness or decreased misery is a

right act.2. VE (under Conditions (1) to (4) decreases misery.3. Hence, VE of this sort is a right act.

But a Utilitarian must be reasonably assured that there really could be a decrease in misery. He could ensure this by insisting on the following two extra conditions:

(e) that the act be in the best interests of the personand (f) it does not violate anyone's rights.

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If these conditions are not met then it may have all manner of longer-term unfortunate effects. Now Rachel's thinks that these two conditions can be satisfied in any case. In addition, we have to note the following conditions:

(g) It must be in the interests of the patient's loved ones. (They would not have to suffer the suffering of the patient) and(h) It must be in the interests of the nation. (In general the nation pays.)

Here we may ask whether consent really confers right? An example: many people don't object to being exploited (even where resistance may improve matters) but this doesn't mean that we have the right to exploit. Also, a masochist may ask us to whip him, but it is at least questionable whether it would be moral to do so. To be entitled to think that we have the right to resort to VE, we have to be sure of two things:

(i) That the person has the right to take his own life. (Otherwise how could he transfer that right to us by giving his permission?)and(j) that this right is transferable.

This poses some difficulties. For example, we do not have the right to do just anything even with our own property, just because it is ours. It is therefore an open question whether a person has the right to take his own life and whether he can give this right to someone else. So, the morality of VE to some extent depends upon the morality of suicide. We may say just for the moment that it is not clear that the patient does have this right. Even if he does have the right, it does not follow that it is morally correct to transfer it. I may have a gun, but it would hardly be morally correct for me to give it to a homicidal maniac. So it is not clear that VE does not violate any rights.

What about it being in the patient's best interests? Does VE really reduce misery? It might be thought obvious that it cuts down on the patient's misery. We must not forget, however, that pain can often be controlled and the person helped to live a positive life. (Think of the work of hospices here.) It is not clear that a person who can freely and intelligently say 'kill me' could not be helped in this way. The actual facts of each case are almost always complicated. Also, it is not clear that a general attitude of being in favour of VE (especially if it led to its legalisation) would not hinder proper development of alternatives. (VE could be an easy way out.) Finally, pressure could perhaps be put on the patient, 'Wouldn't it be better all round?'

It is not easy to evaluate these side effects but they do raise doubts as to whether VE, even given the satisfaction of Conditions (1) to (4), really would reduce total misery. It may even increase it. Now this doesn't show that VE is morally wrong. It does show that the Utilitarian has a hard time justifying it. But we could take a non-utilitarian attitude towards it, claiming that it is our clear duty to help that very person in misery, regardless of longer-term costs. However, we may question the notion that bringing about the death of a person can do less harm than leaving them alive.

Firstly, once an individual is dead, there can be no chance of any other alternative being used. If he is kept alive there may be hope, however tiny, and even virtually no hope is more hope than no hope. Secondly, there is a tendency to think of death as a state a person can be in, one in which no pain is being experienced. But, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein has remarked, "Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death." We experience our dying maybe, but not our death. We can be easily misled by our poetic metaphors into thinking that death is like some eternal, unfathomably peaceful sleep, albeit one from which one can never be roused. But is this correct? Pain in sleep is ended because of a suspension of consciousness; pain in death is ended because the person no longer exists: A BIG

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DIFFERENCE. A person can never be straightforwardly 'better off dead' because death is not a state for a person to be better off in. And there is no state because there is no person to be in one. This does not mean that a person might not be better off now if he were to be killed, but this would require more argument.

Points for Discussion

1. Would legalising voluntary euthanasia set us on the slippery slope towards involuntary euthanasia?

2. Can a person have a right to die?

3. May death ever be regarded as preferable to living in terminal pain?

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Meta-Ethics contents

Argument 9

Some Preliminary Discussion

What is meta-ethics? Meta-ethics concerns the nature of ethics itself and the nature and status of moral language. Take the pronouncements: "This action is right" and "This person is good". What are we doing when we say these things? Can these pronouncements possibly be facts? Or are they pronouncements of some other kind? In answering this question, we are doing meta-ethics.

Hume's TheoryImpressed by the various difficulties attached to grounding morality, the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) proposed a theory of moral philosophy which, at least in spirit, has played a central role in the development of the subject - even to this day. It is important, therefore, to get clear its major points and the difficulties to which it seems subject.

Hume's thesis can be summed up in the following series of propositions:

a) Morality is a matter of feeling rather than reason. b) Actions are to be considered good and bad purely in accordance with whether they produce in us feelings of approval or revulsion c) Virtue is nothing more than this feeling of approval. (So, the fact 'x is good' means no more than 'x is approved of'.)

Hume unflinchingly drew the great conclusion from all this:

"'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger".

The Fact – Value DistinctionThis we get from David Hume. It is often encapsulated by saying that you cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.

Compare the following:

Argument 9a 1. Any act against the law is punishable.2. Theft is against the law.3. So, theft is punishable.

Argument 9b1. Any act against the law is punishable.2. Theft is against the law.3. So, theft ought not to be done.

Argument 9a is valid; Argument 9b is not – an ‘ought’ has been brought into the conclusion that is not there in either premise.

Of course, we could change 9b to read

Argument 9c1. Any act that is against the law ought not to be done.2. Theft is against the law.3. So, theft ought not to be done.

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This is valid but here we have already incorporated an 'ought' into the major premise, so Hume would presumably say that this assertion is not factual.

ResponseCertainly, one cannot derive an 'ought' from conclusions containing only 'is-s'. But it does not follow that moral statements can never be factual. It may, for example, be just as much a fact that Hitler was a bad man as it is that Hitler led the Germans, even though they may be facts of very different kinds.

One suggestion here is that 'ought' has to with prescribing some course of action rather than describing any kind of fact. So, if we start off with premises containing only 'is-s', of course we cannot derive a conclusion containing an 'ought'. We cannot derive a prescription (‘We ought to do x’) from a description (‘X is something or other’).

Moral RealismTake the pronouncements: "This action is right" and "This person is good". What are we doing when we say these things? The moral realist is someone who says that these pronouncements are true or false. Their truth or falsity lies in whether the action or the person has the property of rightness or goodness. The properties of rightness or goodness exist in their own right in order to be had (instantiated) by the action or person. Realism is a form of objectivism about ethics: ethical pronouncements are genuine judgements which are true or false independently of our opinions and sentiments: they can only be so if there is a moral reality (if goodness and rightness exist in their own right). There has to be something the judgements can be true or false about.

Moral Realists say there are such things as moral facts, just as there are scientific ones, and they can be discovered just as can other facts (though our means of discovering them may be quite different). It follows that they place correctness at centre stage: if we discover moral facts, we can be right, but we can also be wrong. Moral realists are so called, in other words, because they think that there is a moral reality out there, independent of our opinions, feelings and sentiments and awaiting our best investigation, just as we may think that there is a physical reality out there, equally independent of our opinions, and equally awaiting our investigation. (Though there are philosophers who have denied even this.) For a moral realist, our moral beliefs can be definitely true or false (even if we cannot decide which) - they are true if they correspond to this moral reality, and false if they do not. An associated thesis is Moral Cognitivism – the thesis that moral judgements can be known.

An analogy: "The Earth is spherical". This is a true or false statement. It is true or false depending on whether the Earth has the property of being a sphere. The earth either has or does not have this property, regardless of our opinions or beliefs. We are thus realists about the property 'spherical-ness'; it exists independently of us and of our opinions. Non-realists deny all this. There is no moral reality out there, independent of our feelings and so on. In fact our moral commitments and values just are feelings (of a certain sort); in any case, the moral non-realist will stress that there is a close connection between feelings and moral views. Associated with this is Moral Non-Cognitivism – the thesis that moral judgements cannot be known.

Often, Moral Realism goes with Moral Cognitivism and Moral Non-Realism goes with Moral Non-Cognitivism. After all, if there is a moral reality, it seems not entirely unlikely that it would be knowable. (Think of non-moral reality. Don’t we know about this?) Likewise, if there is no moral reality (Moral Non-Realism), how could we know about it or form genuine beliefs about it? Be careful, though, each is a pair of different theses. The Realism / Non-Realism distinction is about what there is; the Cognitivism and Non-Cognitivism distinction is about what can be known or what we can have genuine beliefs about. Think how each pair might just come apart.

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Intuitionism (A Kind Of Realism)This approach originated with G.E.Moore in his Principia Ethica (1903). Versions of it have been defended by H.A.Pritchard (1871-1947) and W.D.Ross (1877-1971). The basic idea is that good is a simple undefinable, unanalysable, non-natural property. Indeed, to identify goodness with any other definable property is to commit what Moore called The Naturalistic Fallacy. Suppose we try to argue that goodness is pleasure. Moore says it will always be an open question whether this is so. Moore says it will always be an open question as to whether some other property is really good. This does not mean that pleasure cannot be a good thing. Moore was simply arguing that it can not be the very same property. Goodness is not a natural property. We detect it by means of a special intuition. It places great emphasis on the self-evident quality of our moral intuitions that certain things are good and certain actions right.

Difficulties with Intuitionism1. How can we be intuitively aware of just goodness or the rightness of an act? Of course, we may have an intuitive conviction of something’s goodness but this will be based on what we see and hear and so on. That is, it will depend on the presence of certain natural properties.2. Intuitionists maintain that we can never give reasons for something’s being good, we just intuit it. However, it seems plausible to suggest that reasons can and do enter our moral considerations.

Modern forms of moral realism eschew simpler forms of intuitionism.

Motivations for Moral Realism1) We have a notion of correctness in our morality: that some of our judgements are in fact true, others false.2) Phenomenology: it is part of what-it-is-like to be immersed in our moral lives that some things, actions, people just are good and right, and that others are wrong and bad, and that this isn't just down to the way we may feel about things.3) We seem to acknowledge that we are concerned, when thinking morally, to get things right.

It is hard to see how to account for these under non-realism. We will strengthen moral realism by looking at some common objections and the responses a realist may make.

Arguments Against Moral RealismAgainst the moral realist we can ask, if moral views are just beliefs about some independently existing reality, how is it possible that there is a close connection between feeling and morality? Against his critic the realist will ask how we are to make sense of the idea that we seek to make right decisions, not merely ones which accord with our feelings.

Argument 9d1. 1f moral values are real, they must be objects of some kind - just as other things

in the real external world are objects.2. Values can never be such objective entities.3. So, values cannot be real.

In his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977) John Mackie puts it this way: "[values] are not part of the fabric of the world". He says that if they were they would have to be "entities or qualities of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe". (p.38)

The point that Mackie is making here is that we have a good conception of the sorts of things which exist in the universe - physical objects, properties and processes of various kinds - and moral values are not plausible candidates to fit this model. Mackie's universe is not filled with entities as strange as these would be. And we must concede that such entities as moral values,

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if they existed, would, in a sense, be strange things, for they are things which we ought to let guide our action - no other thing in the universe can do this. What sort of real object could have the property that it ought to be obeyed? It seems preposterous to say that there can be things in the world - strange objects of some kind - that have the property of obliging us to obey them. Objects can cause things to happen but not morally oblige anything. Moral values cannot cause our actions and anything that does not (cannot) enter into causal explanations cannot be real.

According to Mackie, the same applies to our reasons for moral action. These cannot be any more real than the values themselves, for whatever our reasons may be, they are not needed in order to explain the actions we take - all we need to explain the existence of our actions is some set of psychological facts. Consequently, again on the principle that what does not enter into explanations of things cannot be real, moral reasons cannot be real.

ResponseIs the basic assumption behind this argument correct? Would moral values have to be some kind of mysterious object, with mysterious properties? In his book The View From Nowhere, (OUP, 1986) moral realist Thomas Nagel maintains that the view that moral values are real does not entail the view that they are some kind of real object but that they are real values. What this entails is that "claims about values and about what people have reason to do may be true or false independently of our beliefs and inclinations". Why must we assume that the only real things in the world are things that can enter into causal accounts?

Argument 9e1. If moral values are objective, we must be able to understand them from an

objective point of view.2. Nothing matters from an objective point of view.3. So, if moral values are objective, they wouldn’t matter.

Of course, moral values do matter, so they cannot be objective.

ExplanationIf claims of value have to be objectively correct, then it is easy to see that such claims must be false. Why? Because, so the argument goes, nothing matters at all from the objective point of view. If we become truly objectively detached from our interests, if we view the world from a truly objective standpoint, we can see that nothing matters. It matters nothing from this point of view whether things are this way or that: one arrangement or set of facts about the world is just as good as any other from the objective view. It is only from our own individual subjective standpoints that there is even the appearance of value. It is the very fact that morality matters that prevents it from being objective, or so the argument goes.

ResponseWhy should we assume that objective judgements must be based only on information taken from a purely detached standpoint? From that standpoint it may be true that we would have no reason to believe that anything had value. But our objective view does not depend on this information alone. Indeed, it is surely an objective fact that there is at least the appearance of value to (at least some) human beings. So, a moral realist could say that at least one possible explanation of the appearance of moral value is that moral value actually objectively exists.

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Argument 9f1. Moral values differ markedly according to culture.2. Objective facts do not differ according to culture.3. So, moral values cannot be objective facts.

ExplanationIf we take into account the sheer variety of cultural difference in the world, and the fact that psychological and social factors influence our moral views, it seems highly implausible to suppose that the moral values have independent existence all their own. The point is that we know that some societies have held to certain values, and that other societies, with different cultures, in various places in the world and at different times, have held to different values. Surely, given this, it is more plausible to hold that cultures create their own values rather than discover independently existing ones.

ResponseWhy assume that because values are socially inculcated, they must be created by that society? There are, after all, other areas of knowledge which are taught by social pressure. Often things are believed without rational grounds, but that doesn't stop them from being areas of knowledge, and it doesn't stop what is believed from being true or false. At one time nearly everybody, we might assume, thought the Earth to be flat, now most of us, at least in our culture, do not, but does this mean that the statement 'The Earth is flat' is not definitely and objectively true or false, independently of our belief?

Argument 9g1. Moral values motivate action.2. Objective facts cannot motivate.3. So, moral values cannot be objective facts.

ExplanationSay I have a friend whom I should help. Say also that I help out of what I take to be moral conviction. However, all I need to explain my act of help is two things. First, I need a belief - in this case the belief that my friend is in need of help. Secondly, I must have the desire to help my friend. In that case my desire must be found within what I am calling my moral conviction. But if that is so, how can my moral conviction be a matter of purely believing something, as the moral realist seems to be saying? (Remember that Moral Realism is the view that moral opinions are beliefs about moral reality, capable of being either true or false.) My moral conviction is motivating; it inclines help. The charge the realist now faces is that beliefs alone cannot motivate, they require desires to go with them. For example, my belief that there is a pint of beer before me cannot alone motivate me to drink it, I also need the desire to do so. This means that moral convictions cannot just be beliefs about things.

ResponseThe moral realist can point to a (seeming) fact about our moral lives here. Once we become aware of a moral demand - once we arrive, that is, at a moral belief about something - our choice of action really does seem constrained by this belief: our action can be seen as something demanded by the situation we are facing. Yet this may be completely independent of our desires. Indeed, they may even conflict with them. In short, we don't need desires as well as our beliefs about the situation we face in order to motivate our action - the beliefs themselves will do. The moral realist can say, moral constraints can carry weight with us (that is, motivate us in some way, or be an essential part of our motivation) even in the teeth of our desires.

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Moral Non-Cognitivism (Moral Non-Realism)There is no moral reality out there, independent of our feelings and so on. In fact our moral commitments and values are just feelings; in any case, the moral non-cognitivist will stress that there is a close connection between feelings and moral views. (It is called ‘non-cognitivism’ because it is against the view that morality involves a certain kind of belief.) Against the moral realist, the non-cognitivist will ask, if moral views are just beliefs about some independently existing reality, then how come there is this close connection between feeling and morality? Two forms of non-cognitivism are Emotivism and Prescriptivism.

EmotivismThe existence of moral conflict and disagreement, and the seeming lack of any way of objectively resolving these matters have also led more recent philosophers to the view that moral judgements are not, strictly speaking, proper judgements at all. Compare the fact that science and careful, systematic observation of empirical matters can often resolve conflict of opinion on matters of fact concerning natural things and properties

The philosopher A. J. Ayer was one of the best-known non-cognitivists. Consider the situation in which one person tells another that it is wrong to steal money. Ayer says:

". . . it is as if I had said, 'You stole that money' [a factual judgement] in a particular tone of horror . . . The tone . . . adds nothing to the literal meaning of the sentence ['You stole that money.'] It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by certain feelings in the speaker" (Language, Truth and Logic, [1936] Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, p.142)

In short, ethical pronouncements aren't really factual judgements - intuitive or otherwise - they are merely expressions of feelings. To say that Jesus is good is to say 'Hooray for Jesus', and to say that Hitler is bad is just to say 'Boo to Hitler'.

PrescriptivismThis approach is most famously associated with R. M. Hare (1919-2002) in his The Language of Morals (OUP, 1952) and Freedom and Reason (OUP, 1963). The central idea is that morality is action guiding. Moral commitment amounts to the issuing and / or accepting a command to behave in a certain way, i.e., a certain way of behaving is prescribed. To say something is good is to commend it to people. Opposing moral opinion amounts to the issuing of opposing moral commands and moral inconsistency amounts to the issuing of commands that cannot all be followed. Hare accepts that the prescriptions issued are intended universally. Without this, they would not be part of morality. This is the force of the word ‘ought’.

Difficulties with Non-Cognitivism1. In leaving no room for the idea of moral truth, it cannot accommodate the notion we have of correctness applying to our moral judgements.2. It leaves little room for rational discussion about moral issues.3. It denies that we can ever observe that a person is, say, courageous or rude - these properties are not there to be observed. All we can ever observe are entirely non-evaluative aspects of a person's behaviour and then take up an attitude of approval or dislike towards them.4. Hare (along with others) might be questioned on universalisabilty. If ‘I ought to do x’ means as ‘everyone in relevantly similar circumstances ought to do x’, we are entitled to enquire as to what the relevantly similar circumstances are. Then we begin to find, at a sufficiently fine-grained level of detail, that circumstances never are – even in relevant ways - precisely similar.

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5. One may prefer bad or worse things, even knowing that they are bad or worse. One may, for instance’ not like and thus not prefer good books. No doubt this is a sign of terrible taste but it is not unintelligible. So, how can ‘good’ be commendatory, as Hare says?6. To call someone, say, generous amounts to be committed to generosity on Hare’s view. However, I can surely regard someone as generous without having any commitment to being that way myself. The same applies to other virtues.

All of the features of non-cognitivism seem to go against the phenomenology of our ethical thinking - the 'what-it-is-like-ness' of our moral lives. For one thing, acceptance of the fact / value distinction seems to suggest that whatever the facts of the matter, we are free to value what we like. But are we? It seems false to think that we can bring ourselves to value just anything at all. Also, we just as often take ourselves to observe moral facts (e.g. that something is evil or that someone is showing courage) as we do non-evaluative facts (e.g. that the sun is shining). Indeed, we often take ourselves to take up a certain attitude of approval or dislike of something precisely because we can see it to be good or bad: the goodness or badness gives rise to our attitudes. We do not naturally suppose that it is our attitudes that make something good or bad. The non-cognitivist seems to get things the wrong way round.

Points for Discussion1. If there are moral facts, we can argue about them and ask just what the facts

are. Can any sense be made of moral argument within non-cognitivism?

2. When we see, say, an act of compassion or kindness, what is going on with us? Can we just see the goodness of the act?

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The Philosophy

ofReligion

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The Philosophy of Religion contents

Some Preliminary DiscussionChurchgoers in my local parish were asked in a recent survey why they believed in God. A clear pattern emerged from their answers. People believed in God for one or more of the following four reasons:

1. the universe exists and something must have caused it 2. the universe is beautifully and elaborately organised, so something must have

designed it 3. something makes existence (especially one’s own) meaningful 4. a feeling in one’s soul of the presence of something which runs much deeper

than anything mundane possibly could – a still small voice, a guide, or a source of profound peace.

It was clear that, for the respondents, only one thing could possibly answer to these thoughts – God.

The agnostic, perhaps even the atheist, can sympathise – at least, if they have an imagination. Try to imagine a God-less existence. How can something truly come from nothing? How could we explain the profound and beautiful pattern upon which the physical organisation of the universe seems based? Why is there order at all, and not chaos? What then could be the source of the experiences people have? Moreover, and perhaps this is the most challenging of all, how can we account for that almost deep feeling that existence does have a meaning and purpose, one that lurks, so to speak, behind the scenes? Why do we have the gut feeling that we have not conferred such purpose upon existence ourselves? This last point, perhaps, is the deepest of all. Even if our lives are running along successfully in a variety of ways, only a blind fool would care to deny the occasional feeling of vulnerability. Almost always, at some point in life, this feeling will be manifested in a particularly acute way. One may feel despair and emptiness, shame or remorse, loneliness or rejection. Then, try Godlessness. Try to get through on nothing but the thought that existence is brute, meaningless and without purpose. Try finding nourishment in the reflection that your existence is pointless and that the laws of the universe will, in a relatively short time, bring about your utter extinction. Perhaps, in the end, atheism is psychologically, even spiritually, unsustainable for the human soul.

Maybe the atheist’s bleak picture is the true one, however. Certainly it is no good just pointing out the fact that his view of the matter is bleak, or black, or even unbearable. Pascal once wrote that there is a God shaped vacuum in every human heart. Alas! Spiritual dependency is no logical guarantor of truth. Maybe there simply is no God to fill Pascal’s vacuum. Further, the notion of God is hardly itself unproblematic. Against this, the theist may point out that Pascal’s vacuum is a very deep-rooted need in the human heart. Very often the existence of a need indicates (though does not logically guarantee) the existence of the thing that may fulfil it. For example, we have a need for food and water. But part of the very reason for this need is that we have evolved in a world in which the things that can satisfy our hunger and our thirst actually exist (even if, sadly, some people find themselves without access to them). Perhaps the same can be said for our deepest spiritual need – if that is what it is – God.

What is it, though, to be religious? In one sense the answer to this may seem obvious: to be religious is to believe in God (or gods). Yet a moment’s reflection reveals that this answer, while true as far as it goes, does not go far enough. Being religious involves more than just belief. One may believe all sorts of things, some trivial, some profound. To have a belief is to think something is true. But being religious also involves commitment. It isn't just the calm, detached acceptance that God exists. It involves a certain distinctive sort of attitude - one of acceptance, even reliance on the thought that, above all, this is what matters. It involves, at its most profound at least, an attitude of submission to this presumed state of affairs. It is no surprise to recall that the name of one of the world's great monotheistic religions - Islam - means 'surrender'.

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Hereabouts, we hit a difficulty - even, perhaps, a contradiction - for religion. On the one hand, the kind of attitude I have just sketched out, which seems so essential to what it is to be religious, seems to want to go beyond our everyday understanding of the world, our empirical and conceptual understanding of things (as philosophers would put it); it wants to put a stop to questioning. Philosophers never tire of questioning, so it tires of philosophers. We should just submit in faith. On the other hand religion has another aspect to its essence - to give answers to central questions about the ultimate nature of the world, the meaning of life, and human destiny. The trouble lies in trying to square these two aspects. How can you square question and answering with surrender? How can you square the need to make clear purposes, even ultimate ones, with the need for quietism? How can it claim to offer meaning and purpose, while at the same time hushing enquiry and examination? It matters not that these aspects of religion surface at different times. The point is that religion seems to need to embrace both aspects as its very essence.

At this point the idea of faith emerges. So, what is faith? First, we must note that faith doesn't dissipate the contradiction. Rather, it is a part of it. We could always, of course, identify faith with the part which calls for surrender, the part which 'goes beyond' all enquiry and questioning. Next, we could identify religion with the part which spells out life's purposes and answers our questions. Then we can see an escape from the contradiction. There is no contradiction: religion and faith are simply two different things. We can then opt for whichever we please. But this seems unsatisfactory. Why should we want to 'go beyond' all enquiry and questioning - all curiosity - unless it is to find answers to ultimate questions.

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Ideas of God and Religious Language contents

Ideas of GodIn this book we are concerned with the notion of God as it is exemplified in the three great monotheistic religions – Christianity, Islam and Judaism. We will not be concerned with issues surrounding Jesus as an earthly person or, as Christians maintain, the Son of God. Neither will we be concerned with the issue of the Resurrection.

In these monotheistic traditions, God is traditionally seen as possessing certain essential attributes.

1. God is a personal being (as we are personal beings) though (unlike us) he is not embodied.

2. God created the world ex-nihilo (literally out of nothing)3. God is a necessary being. He cannot not exist.4. God is transcendent. He is not limited by space and time and lies beyond the natural

world. He is a supernatural being. He exists outside of the canopy of space and time but we can relate to him anywhere, any time.

5. God is omniscient. God knows all there is to know. (There is an important question about whether God does or can know what we call the future and, if he does, what implications this has for our freedom of choice, but we will not be dealing with that issue.)

6. God is omnipotent. God is not limited in power.7. God has unlimited benevolence. This is often expressed by saying that God’s love

for us is not conditional.8. God is rational. He created the universe for a purpose. What he does is not arbitrary

or impulsive.9. God can perform miracles. God can intervene in the world of nature.10. God is the ground of morality. He is the source of all goodness and love.

This list of attributes makes the God of the monotheistic traditions different from the gods of other traditions (the gods of eastern and pagan traditions). They can also easily give rise to problems, some of which we will be dealing with in detail, some of which are posed as questions in the Points for Discussion.

An important point to keep in mind is that it is incumbent on the theist (one who believes in God) to show how God can have the kinds of qualities attributed to him. If this cannot be shown, then the very coherence of Theism is placed under threat.

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Religious LanguageThere are two basic ways of understanding how religious language functions and what we are doing or saying or presupposing when we talk religion or engage in it - Realist and Non-Realist.

Realism: religious language is objective, it encapsulates truths about real entitiesreligious statements are literally true or falsereligious statements are true independently of our thoughtsreligious language is descriptivereligious understanding is cognitive – it issues in actual knowledgereligion includes (a sort of) causal explanationthere is primacy of belief over practice, the latter is based is on the former

Non-Realism: religious language is not objective (not about real entities)it does not issue in literal truths, it is not descriptiveit is symbolic and expressiveit ties in with forms of lifeit is life-guiding rather than supernatural hypothesisingreligion just is nothing but an expression of a 'certain craving'there is primacy of practice over belief

The Non-Realist ClaimAll this may begin to sound attractive. (And one may remain a realist while still embracing some of the points the non-realist focuses on. For instance, one may think that some stretches of religious language are expressive and symbolic while other stretches are descriptive of real things.) Why, though, should religious belief be modelled on other kinds of belief? Moreover, it seems an attractive way of avoiding charges of supernaturalism. On this view 'God' is not the name of some supernatural being but more a word we use to express our deepest hopes and our profoundest responses to the world in which we find ourselves. Under this view religion is simply form of expression. That is all there is to it. Under the Realist view, the expressive aspect of religion is explained as a response to actual entities and objective truths.

Faith should not be regarded just as a set of beliefs to set alongside (and perhaps compete with) other beliefs (scientific one's for instance) but rather as encapsulating a set of special attitudes. It isn't just something to believe, it's something to live by. Conversion to religious faith is to be seen not as exchanging one theory for another but more as a giving up of oneself to a different way of being in the world. All this suggests a certain view of religion as being a form of life. Religion involves asking the sorts of grave cosmological questions to which the answers are to be seen more as expressions of 'a certain craving' than the description of causes. (See, for example, Culture and Value Wittgenstein, 1980, p.85). Religious belief is not like scientific belief, giving some sort of alternative or bigger explanation of the world. Rather it presents us with an alternative way of being in the world. Indeed, under this view it isn’t really belief at all (in the sense of entertaining certain propositions as true). Rather, it is an expression of need. Religion does not provide extra components to our ordinary or scientific pictures of the world, so that gods can populate it. Nor is it a theory about some supernatural world. Rather it provides an alternative way of picturing this world. Religious rites and rituals are to be seen as ways of involving oneself in a form of life which gives expression to all this. Prayer, for instance isn't to be construed as 'talking to God' as we talk to each other (only with an invisible, supernatural partner) but rather as a means of engaging in this expression.

SCIENCE GIVES WHATEVER CAUSES AND EXPLANATIONS CAN BE GIVENRELIGION IS A RESPONSE TO DEEPER NEEDS.

Arguments for and against the existence of God presuppose that we have a clear idea about what the word 'God' means, and that the only problem concerns his existence. The question of

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what the word 'God' means, however, is not unproblematic. For the non-realist, it is clear that the word 'God' is not supposed to function as a name for some sort of object, and certainly not one whose existence could be verified empirically. Such a thing, even if it could be verified, would just be another thing and not worthy of a religious attitude.

When a religious person talks of God - say as the creator and designer of the world or an uncaused cause - what is happening is not the positing of an entity which has some purely causal relationship with the world; rather, one is seeing God in terms of a perceived overall meaning and purpose.

We can fit particular beliefs held by a religious person about God into this way of looking at things. For instance, saying that God designed the universe isn't to say that the believer has any knowledge of the universe being designed by God but that that way of putting things best reflects the believer’s way of experiencing the universe - it is (as I.T.Ramsay, 1955 put it) a model or analogy of the way in which the believer experiences things - including what they are inclined to call God.

The Realist Counter-AttackIt does seem that belief in God is not just one belief among many. It is fundamental. Firstly it seems unfalsifiable - nothing could possibly count against it. Indeed, it determines what else can count as facts. It structures the believer’s other beliefs. (There are other beliefs, or belief systems, like this: the belief that the world is universally orderly (presupposed by Science); the belief in universal causation; magic. Religious belief is also often held to be a Weltanschauung (German 'world-view'). It is a way of picturing or conceiving the whole world and human destiny and purpose. Religious belief certainly seems to enjoy a special status but can non-realism be sustained.

One problem is that the non-realist proposal doesn't really reflect the way in which most religious believers actually construe their beliefs and practices. Actually this is not a problem for the truth of the view. After all, it is possible that most people have got it wrong - they misconstrue the true nature of their own beliefs and rituals, and so on. And the business of the philosopher is not to find out how people do think (that's psychology and sociology), rather it is to uncover sound ways of thinking.

So is this a sound way of thinking about religion? There are some real problems. First, it fails to explain why the beliefs and rites and rituals take the particular form they have. Secondly, it fails to explain why religious belief and ritual have the complexity and intellectual sophistication that they display. If religion is a serious game, no more than a way of life, why should it have these complex structures? None of this indicates that religion need not or does not involve deep needs or that rituals are not expressive (or have expressive aspects), it is only to question whether that is all there is to such matters.

Further, religious controversy at least doesn't seem to be like arguing about how we should express ourselves. It doesn’t seem to be an argument about how a game should be played. Rather, it is conducted as if objective truths were being debated. Although the religious life is something lived rather than just coldly reasoned about, it seems a distortion of religious life and practice to adopt the Non-Realist position just outlined.

The bottom line is this. If God isn't some real, independently existing entity, with at least some of the powers usually attributed to him - why bother praying? Why bother with the religious life? Why think that there is any significance to religious practice and talk at all? Moreover, such an approach seems to rule out making rational comparisons between different religions. (They just do things differently.)

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Arguments for the Existence of God contents

Argument 10

Preliminary DiscussionThere are a number of different kinds of argument for the existence of God. Three philosophical favourites are - The Cosmological Argument - which argues for God on the basis of the very existence of the universe; The Teleological Argument - which argues for God’s existence on the basis of the form the universe takes; and The Ontological Argument - which argues for God’s existence from the very concept we have of him. (There are a number of other arguments which we shall not be concerned with.)

The Cosmological Argument(An argument from the very existence of the universe) There is something rather than nothing. Many people seem to think that we need to posit God to account for this curious fact. What reason is there to believe this? One way of starting off here is to try and argue that the existence of the universe actually requires the existence of God. How can that be argued? One might here say that God serves as the explanation for the existence of the universe. But is it the case that the existence of something (the universe) rather than nothing requires an explanation?

One short look at the alternatives might suggest so. We have:

(a) the universe explains its own existence,(b) its existence being explained by something other than itself,(c) its existence having no explanation at all.

First, (a) and (c) seem to be non-starters. Surely the world cannot explain its own existence, and to ask us to accept that there is no explanation seems at odds with the principle that there is an explanation for every possible state of affairs. That leaves (b).

To explain the existence of something (say how it came about) must involve a reference to something else. In the case of the entire universe, that 'something else' cannot be any part of or thing in the universe, for if there were such a thing it would merely be part of the universe, and this is the very thing for which we require our explanation.

But if the explanation cannot be something in or about the universe, it must lie elsewhere - namely God. (Though, perhaps, it could be a committee of gods).

But why wouldn't God's existence need an explanation? This seemingly fair question is often blocked by saying that God's existence is necessary. God cannot not exist. That cannot be said for the universe or the things in it, can it? Take anything in the universe, atoms, stars, planets, tables, chairs, and so on. It is perfectly possible that each of these things might not have existed. Such a state of affairs would have been different (in varying degrees) to the one that does happen to exist, but it cannot be ruled out in advance.

Further, since the whole universe is made up of things which might not have existed, it seems reasonable to conclude that the whole universe might just not have existed: there might have been nothing instead of something.

Philosophers call things which might not have existed contingent things. Contingent things require something beyond themselves in order to exist. Chairs need chair makers, I needed my parents, and so on. Now the entire universe is nothing more than the whole (vast) collection of contingent things.

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What we need is an explanation of the whole collection. But here we encounter a difficulty. The explanation for the collection cannot be another contingent thing, for if it were it would merely be a part of the collection. Such a thing wouldn't explain the collection of contingent things, it would merely join it.

This means that if we are to have an explanation for the whole collection, it cannot be a contingent thing. But if it cannot be a contingent thing (something which does not contain the reason for its own existence) it must be a necessary thing (something which cannot not exist) something which just explains itself. And this is God.

Let us formalise this argument.

Definitions: Necessary Being A being for which it is logically impossible for it not to exist. (It is the reason for its own existence.) Contingent Being A being for which it is logically possible for it not to exist. (It is not the reason for its own existence.)Argument 10a 1. For every contingent state of affairs there is a reason why it is just so and not otherwise. 2. The entire series of contingent beings (CS) is a state of affairs.

3. Therefore there is a reason why CS exists and not otherwise (there is a reason why there is something rather than nothing). 4. If the reason for CS were yet another contingent being, it would merely become a further member of CS and join that for which we sought an explanation. 5. Therefore the reason for CS cannot be a contingent being. 6. Therefore, by elimination, it must be a necessity being.

Difficulties:There are problems over the concept of a necessary being. It seems easy enough to define but not to understand. The very notion of something’s being a being seems to invite the notion of the logical possibility of its non-existence. On the other hand, the notion of a causeless contingent series seems hardly any easier to stomach. The very notion of a contingent being seems to incorporate the idea of its having been caused. How could it just be?

Responses:One cannot escape the problem of the cause of the CS by postulating that it has existed through infinite time, one can ask for the cause even of this. It is just that the cause will not be in time. But then if time came about at the beginning of the CS (and is really just a part of it) then the cause (if there is one) must be outside of time anyway. In any event, the chain of causation need not be conceived as horizontal, leading ever further back in time, but vertically: e.g.: I depend on the air I breath; its existence depends on the continued existence of the Earth’s gravitational field; its existence on . . . and so on. (Another CS to be accounted for.)

Does this argument prove the existence of God? It seems to show that if we have contingent things, we must have a necessary thing (God) to explain their existence. It has to be admitted that this argument has convinced many philosophers but perhaps matters are not quite that simple. After all, we must not forget alternative (c).

Perhaps the universe simply has no explanation. If that seems too hard to take, then we must try and make sense of the notion of a necessary being. Can this be done? I will first consider

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this question then return to the idea of the universe having no explanation. My hope is that both alternatives will seem deeply puzzling.

Can any sense be made out of the notion of a necessary being? Well, one can certainly provide a formal definition: a necessary being is a being who cannot not exist - a being which exists purely by its own nature. But what does all this mean? We can certainly make a good distinction between the necessary and contingent when it comes to statements. This is a frequently encountered distinction in philosophy, so let's make sure we understand it.

A necessary true statement (in philosophical jargon) is not one which you must make but, rather, which must be true. (Conversely, a necessary false statement is one which must be false.) Here the 'must' is logical. It couldn’t possibly be that a necessarily true statement was anything other than true.

Geometric statements are often held as prime examples. Take, 'A triangle is a three-sided figure'. There are other sorts of examples, however, such as, 'A bachelor is an unmarried man'. One way of saying why statements like these are necessarily true is to say that they are made true simply by the meaning of the words they contain. Anything which didn't have three sides just wouldn't be called a triangle - and so on.

We can contrast these with contingent statements. Most things we say are contingently true, if they are true at all (otherwise, they are contingently false). A contingently true statement is one which is made true not by the meaning of the words used but by the world being the way it is. For example:

'Cake is fattening' and 'The sun is 93m miles from the Earth'.

If these are true statements, what makes them true is just the world being the way that it is. They are not necessarily true, because if the world had been different in relevant respects, they would be false. Contrast this with one of our necessary propositions: there is no possible world in which triangles have anything other than three sides.

The whole area of necessity and contingency as applied to statements is subject to philosophical discussion itself (much of it rather technical) but enough has been said to show that the idea of necessity, when applied to the truth or falsity of certain classes of statements, seems sensible, at least for starters. Have some fun thinking of your own examples.

What, however, of this notion of a necessary being? Can any sense be made of that? Since we are seeking explanations we might say, in our context, that the necessary being concerned is one which contains its (or his, or hers) own explanation. It had better do, at any rate, for if this being (God) did not contain the reason for his own existence then --- what?

He would merely be just another contingent thing - part of the universe itself - and, as we have seen, he would require an explanation for his existence which was outside himself - another god (Super-God). And our worry would break out all over again. So God must be a necessary being if he is to function as creator of the universe of contingent things.

Now one problem here is why we should go so far as God in the first place. God is a being which is supposed to explain his own existence. But this requires that we make sense of the idea that a being can explain its own existence. And if any sense can be made of this notion, why not just say that the universe itself explains its own existence? That would make the universe itself a necessary being. Of course, this seems hard to make sense of but is it any harder than trying to make sense of the idea that God exists necessarily?

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If, on the other hand, no sense can be attached to the idea of a being (any being) that can explain its own existence then this applies to God also. Thus we get nowhere.

If to explain the existence of some thing involves a reference to something outside itself then it is meaningless to talk of anything at all (including God) containing the reason for its own existence (i.e. explaining its own existence).

One might here reply that it is only within the realm of contingent things (the universe itself) that we need seek explanations of things outside of them. Thus the existence of this book has an explanation outside of itself. In response to this it might be said that when we talk of God, we are encountering a quite different form of explanation. But what different sort of explanation? What meaningful alternative is there to seeking explanations for the existence of things which go outside the things in question?

Of course, if we cannot make sense of the possibility that something (God) can explain its own existence, then we are left with a problem - How do we explain the existence of the universe? Well, perhaps we can't. Perhaps it just doesn't have one. Indeed, if the explanation for the universe cannot lie in the creative act of a necessary being, then the universe not only does not but cannot have an explanation.

This would make the existence of the universe ultimately mysterious. Indeed, its existence would be the ultimate, final mystery. But is this idea so bad? It might be intellectually unsatisfying. After all, we live lives in which we constantly seek explanations for things (and often succeed). But then even if we believe in God, we still have to face the existence of ultimate mystery, and this includes the problematic notion of a necessary being.

In the end, perhaps we all just have to face up to the existence of ultimate mystery. On this account the crucial difference between theist and atheist seems to be one of where to locate that mystery. The theist locates it in the idea of a necessary being (God); the atheist locates it at the existence of the universe itself. Take your choice.

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The Ontological Argument(An argument from the very concept of God)

This celebrated argument for the existence of God originated with St Anselm (in his Proslogion, 1099). It attempts to prove the existence of God from the very concept we have of God. In other words, it says that if you understand the concept we have of God, you understand that he must exist. It goes like this.

Argument 10b1. God is the greatest of all objects of thought. 2. Therefore, God exists in the understanding.3. If the thing which fell under this concept (God) existed only in our understanding

and not in reality, then we could conceive of something greater still (namely something which existed in reality as well as our understanding).

4. This would be to conceive of a something else greater than the something which (by definition) it is impossible to have anything greater than. This is a self-contradiction.

5. Hence God (to be the greatest) cannot exist only in our understanding, he must exist also in reality.

ExplanationPremise 1 says that God is 'something than which nothing greater can be conceived'.Premise 2 must be true because we understand this concept of God.To say that God is the greatest conceivable thing yet exists only in our understanding is a self-contradiction. A self-contradiction is involved, as stated in Premise 4, because something else greater could be conceived, namely something which did exist in reality.

ResponseIs existence really a perfection (or indeed a quality of something at all)? Or is it that which makes other perfections (and qualities) possible? Is existence a predicate? Take the following statements about pigs:

Pigs snortPigs make baconPigs have trottersPigs fly

The parts in italics are the predicates that qualify the subject of each ‘Pigs’. These predicates attribute qualities (either truly or falsely) to pigs. Now take:

Pigs exist

Although grammatically speaking ‘exists’ is the predicate of the sentence, is it so logically? That is, does it attribute an extra quality (truly or falsely) to pigs? Many philosophers now would answer, ‘No’.

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A Further Ontological ArgumentIn our present century a different version has been put forward. A starter version goes as follows:

Definition Something is unsurpassably perfect if it exists in all possible worlds.

Argument 10c1. It is possible that an unsurpassably perfect being exists. (This means that such a

being exists in at least one possible world.)2. If it exists in one possible world it must exist in all possible worlds. (Since

something in that one possible world exists which (by definition) then exists in all possible worlds.)

3. If it exists in all possible worlds then its existence is necessary.

ResponseShould we really allow that it is even possible that a being so defined exists? This concession looks reasonable, but is it? Something which exists in all possible worlds is necessary, so the first premise says 'possibly necessarily God exists' but this entails 'necessarily God exists' Doesn't the argument assume the truth of what it sets out to prove?

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The Teleological Argument for the Existence of God(An argument from the way the universe is)

Is it reasonable to infer the existence of God from the fact that the universe seems to be highly ordered; from the fact that it is a cosmos (order), not a chaos (disorder)? Here we consider the so-called ‘Argument from Design’ or ‘Teleological Argument’. (‘Telos’ is the Greek word for ‘purpose’ or ‘goal’. We may express the argument (roughly) as follows:

Argument 10c1. The world is ordered to a very high degree.2. Either a) this order arose purely by chance

Or b) it was the result of intelligent design.3. (a) is implausible.4. Therefore it arose out of intelligent design.

But order is of two kinds – spatial and temporal. We will consider two arguments, the first depends largely on the spatial ordering of things; the second on temporal ordering.

The First Teleological ArgumentThe first comes from William Paley in the 18 th. Century. He asks us to imagine just coming across a watch on the ground. You examine it and find it to have an immensely complex internal structure. You soon realize that the parts relate to one another and that they do so for a purpose. You conclude that the watch did not come about by accident and that it must have been designed by an intelligence for this purpose. Paley points out that the universe is rather like that watch – a complex of inter-related parts, an immensely rich structure, and so forth. He thinks that we can therefore infer that the universe was designed. Of course, this could only be done by God.

A similar argument comes from David HumeLook round the world: Contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy, which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceed, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori . . . do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence. (Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, 1994: II, p.109)

Let us try to formalise this kind of argument:

Argument 10d1. The world is ordered, in fact to a very high degree.2. The ordered things we know about have designers.3. Hence it is probable that the ordered universe has a designer – God.

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ResponseThis is essentially an argument from analogy; natural and man-made things are being thought of as similar. Hume, however, thinks that this sort of reasoning will not do. He points out that if we see, say, a house, we can safely infer that it had an architect because we have had lots of experience of houses being designed. However, we have never seen universes being designed. It is a unique object, so the analogy is broken and we cannot arrive at the same conclusion as we do when we see a house.

Hume also points out that there may be any number of causes for the apparent design of the universe. He says that since,

…the universe bears a greater likeness to animal bodies and to vegetables than to the works of human art, it is more probable, that its cause resembles the cause of the former than of the latter, and its origin ought rather to be ascribed to generation of vegetation than to reason or design. (Hume 1994: VII p.138)

He jests that the universe may even have been spun from the bowels of an ‘infinite spider’. These days many people would think that evolution (both the development of the lifeless cosmos and, later, natural selection) could account for the order we see. He also has other criticisms. Perhaps the universe was created by many gods; perhaps he had many goes and had many failures before he got it remotely right; maybe the god who created it is now dead. These points are important, for they show us that even if the argument works, it doesn’t prove the existence of a god remotely like the sort of God people actually worship.

What About Natural Selection?Does Darwin’s Theory of Evolution refute the Argument from Design? We do not have to assume that adaptation to the environment is (always) the result of the direct action of a designer. Rather, we can claim that the final explanation for the existence of adaptation is the result of such intelligent action. In a nutshell, God makes the rules (laws of physics and nature, perhaps knowing how matters will turn out) then lets the universe get on with it. We can have both Dawkin’s ‘blind watchmaker’ and God, for the latter determined the action of the former. The trouble here is that all this shows is that evolution is consistent with the existence of God. Any argument from design for the existence of God seems to have evaporated.

Response to Hume’s CriticismsThe uniqueness of the universe does not prevent us from drawing some conclusions concerning its origin. This is what cosmologists attempt to do, with some considerable success. The philosopher of religion Richard Swinburn (see ‘God, Regularity and David Hume’ in Davies, B., ed., Philosophy of Religion: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press, 2000) also points out that Hume’s point about vegetation fails to explain the laws operating behind this process. Such laws explain the growth of vegetation, not the other way around. So, we are left with the question as to why the laws exist or are as they are.

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The Second Teleological ArgumentThis comes from Richard Swinburn (The Existence of God, Oxford University Press, 1991, Ch.8). The first Teleological Argument focused on the spatial order of things; Swinburn focuses on temporal order (how things are arranged in time). Laws hold over time. Science cannot explain this. (Indeed, science seems to presuppose this being the case.) Swinburn concludes that this temporal orderliness, `cries out for explanation in terms of some single common source with the power to produce it' (p.145). God, suggests Swinburn, is the simplest explanation for this.

Again formalizing the argument we have the following:

Argument 10e1. The world is ordered in time through law, in fact to a very high degree.2. God is the simplest explanation for this.3. Therefore we may infer that God exists.

ResponseThe clearest point of attack focuses on the second premise. When we say God made the world, are we really explaining how the world exists? Compare, ‘things fall to Earth because of gravity’. In any case, in order to be the simplest explanation of anything, the notion of God would have to be clear and unproblematic. Is it? It may be argued that it is a poor explanation that explains one mystery in terms of a greater mystery still. Of course, we may still be inspired by order to believe in a designer. When contemplating the universe, we may still feel ourselves called upon to make a theistic response.

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Faith, Reason and Belief contents

Religious ExperienceResearch exists which shows that up to 70% of people in modern Britain have undergone something they would be inclined to call religious experience. The problem is that the expression ‘religious experience’ is rather vague. Some may use it to convey a sense of (otherwise inexplicable) longing or gratitude. More narrowly (and usually in philosophy) it refers to those experiences in which a person takes themselves to be aware of God or of some ultimate reality.

Here we follow Swinburn’s method of classifying religious experience. (Richard Swinburn, The Existence of God, Oxford, OUP, 1991, p.250-1) However, it is first necessary to understand Swinburn’s distinction between public and private perceptions. A perception is public iff (if and only if) some object, under normal conditions, standardly causes normally equipped perceivers to experience it. Say you see a house. Say also that the house is there, right in front of you. Say also that the house in question was part of the cause of your seeing it (it reflected light into your eyes). Say, further, that other normally equipped perceivers stood around you and had the same experience. Then your perception of the house is a public perception. However, if you are the only one who enjoys the experience, or if only some did (given that all the subjects are normal) then the perception is private.

Swinburn goes on to distinguish five types of religious experience:

1. The perception of an ordinary (non-religious) object may come in such a way as to be also an experience of God. One may look at natural wonders and experience this.

2. The perception of an unusual public object accompanied by a religious experience. (For example, the disciples seeing the risen Jesus.)

3. A private experience may be had of some sensations that constitute a religious experience, yet the experience could be described in ordinary words. (The appearance of what the subject takes to be an angel.)

4. A private experience of certain sensations that comes as a religious experience but which cannot be described in ordinary words. (Say, having an intuition that something is the case.)

5. A private experience but without any sensations, as when one experiences God telling one that one should do something or when one simply experiences God.

Can these experiences show that God exists? Are such experiences really of God or of God in things?

Arguments AgainstIf such experiences are really experiences of God, then we might say that they are like ordinary experiences of ordinary things in the following ways:

a) there are standard ways of checking the accuracy of reported experiences, first by checking one sense modality against another - as in both seeing and feeling that something is furry; secondly by seeing if someone else has the same experience in the same situation. (Do we both see that tree?); b) we are able to perceive regularities in the behaviour of things and are able to predict what they will do under such and such conditions; c) we may check whether we have explanations of failure (e.g. blindness); d) we may find out that others perceive things in much the same way.

We can now mount an argument against:

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Argument 10f1. An experience as of God can only genuinely be an experience of God iff it

satisfies all conditions (a) to (d) above.2. So-called religious experience fails to satisfy these conditions.3. So, such experience cannot be an experience of God.

ExplanationWe count experiences of ordinary worldly objects as genuine because they pass these tests. It is often thought quite reasonable that experiences as of God should do so if they are to be regarded as genuine. What else could guarantee them? Yet, how are we to check them? Can we make predictions from them? (Predict what God can do!) Furthermore, not everyone has religious experiences. Also, precisely what is experienced seems dependent on one’s religious culture. Critics consider all this to be more than enough to render so-called religious experience non-veridical (i.e. as conveying no truth).

Responses: The Argument ForArgument 10g

1. It is unwise to dismiss experiences which have played such an important, dynamic and inspirational part in human life.

2. Religious experience is such an experience.3. Hence it would be unwise to dismiss such experience.

Argument 10h (Formulated as a ‘Principle of Credulity’ by Richard Swinburn, 1991)1. When a subject takes himself to be perceiving x, he normally is perceiving x.2. In religious experiences, the subject perceives God, beyondness, etc.3. Hence, we may normally take the subject to be perceiving these things.

The word ‘normally’ here indicates that there are circumstances in which one would, quite rationally, not take a subject to be perceiving what he takes himself to perceive. He may be under the influence of drugs, the circumstances may be such as to mislead the unwary (e.g. seeing mirages in deserts). Perhaps independent and reliable evidence exists which indicates that the experiences are false. These are defeating conditions. The challenge is whether such defeating conditions always apply to religious experience. Of course, many people do not claim ever to perceive God in any way and this might be good reason to suppose he is not present, though it could be that God only appears to those who quite deliberately and willingly look. It is true that we perceive ordinary things without any special effort (though this is not always so) but perhaps we are mistaken if we think exactly the same conditions apply to apprehending God as apply to the seeing of ordinary things. One should not expect perceiving God or his actions to be much like seeing ordinary natural objects.

Argument 10i1. If there are checks on the reliability of religious experience and a putative

religious experience passes these checks, then it should be accepted as veridical.2. Such checks do exist and many experiences pass them.3. Hence, such experiences should be accepted as veridical.

Wainwright (Mysticism and Sense Perception, in Cahn, SM. and Shatz, D. (eds.) Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, Oxford, OUP, 1982, pp.127-8) suggests that such checks would include whether the experience had good effects (upon the individual and community); whether it allows the person to speak with more depth; whether it accords with the religious experiences of others, with what is taught in religion and with what religious authorities say.

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Is Faith Rational?Finding a basis for faith may strike some as odd. Isn't faith that which gives other things their basis, remaining itself the base? But where does this leave things? First, one can always ask the question - Why have faith? If answer comes there none, then no one gets any further. Moreover, such silence provides scant grounds for getting somebody else to share a faith, for anyone who doesn't already share the faith needs grounds if they are to be persuaded. In any case, such silence is rare; many religious people are only too eager to tell us why they have faith. And even those who are less eager usually, if gently prodded, come up with answers, i.e., reasons for their faith (where 'reasons' means justifications). And all this is surely right. If religious faith is to guide our lives; if it is call for commitment and a certain sort of attitude to be taken towards life, the universe, everything; if it is really to give us answers to our greatest and most pressing problems, then it surely should be rationally justifiable. Of course, in practice, our justifications stop somewhere. But we should all be expected to make a start, whatever our ultimate position.

It is at this point that philosophy starts to take an interest. What philosophers of religion are interested in doing is subjecting the reasons people give for their faith and the claims they make for it to critical scrutiny. They ask - Do these claims stand up? Are these reasons and arguments good ones or do they rest on error? For instance, religious people typically make claims to a certain kind of experience - religious experience. Very well, the philosopher wants to know what grounds the subject has for thinking of such experiences as religious. If someone claims, for example, to be experiencing God at work in their lives, the philosopher wants to examine what justifies such a claim. And note the word 'justifies' here. It is important. The philosopher (as philosopher) is not interested in psychology or sociology or history. The philosopher does not want to know about the family upbringing of the religious claimant, or the cultural, historical origin or the personal development of someone’s religious claim. The philosopher wants to know what grounds we have for thinking such claims to be true - and psychological, cultural, social and historical factors have no bearing on this.

The first thing to note about this is that anyone with a willing (and rational) enough mind can do it. You may do it from the position of one of the faithful or you may do from the position of atheist or agnostic. What matters is having an open-ness to argument. Nor is this something that is of importance only to those who wish to be philosophers, it is important to anyone who wishes to be rational. Note also, that one is not denying here that matters dealt with by religion go beyond reason. Life, in the end, just does go beyond an entirely rational scrutiny. But acknowledging this is not to say that reasons and rationality do not matter as far as they go. Going beyond reason is not the same as ignoring it entirely. If faith ignores reasons and evidence, then it is hard to see how it differs from superstition, uncritical dogmatism or even just dogged insistence. If it is worth its salt, it has grounds. These are what philosophers are interested in. But what grounds faith? How is it possible to make what amounts to a completely open-ended commitment to a set of beliefs, especially when they are so highly contested? Here we encounter some differences between religious and non-religious people.

Many religious people liken religious faith to the sort of faith one person might have in another - a leader, for instance. One may go on trusting a favoured leader in spite of the fact that the leader's outward behaviour might suggest one does otherwise. Love and loyalty might also have like results. However, it is far from clear how this is supposed to help. First, love and loyalty surely carry no commitment to any set of beliefs about the object of one's love or loyalty. Indeed one may love or be loyal to someone you know cannot be trusted.

Second, religious faith often seems to demand that we have commitment and trust even past the point where it would no longer be rational to go on being loyal to a leader. For instance, religious people go on using faith to fill the gap between belief in a loving God and evidence for a loving God. Yet why should we do this?

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Religious people, on the other hand, see the issue in different terms. They are (often) inclined not to perceive a gap between their belief and the evidence. Also, conversion to a religious faith is sometimes invoked not as some explanatory device - using God to explain this that or the other - but rather as a way of seeing things differently - of giving significance and security to one's life and purpose to the existence of the world. Despite appearances, the universe isn't just a meaningless swish of particles and we aren't just biological things.

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Is Religious Belief Basic?Many believers are not inclined to suppose that their position depends on securing good arguments for the existence of God. The philosophical claim behind this approach is that religious belief is ‘basic’. An important figure here is the American philosopher Alvin Plantinga. Plantinga takes an approach to knowledge known as ‘Reformed Epistemology’. Reformed Epistemology is a rejection of classical foundationalism, the view that all knowledge must ultimately be based on self-evident or incorrigible truths. Religious belief is neither self-evident nor incorrigible but it can be basic, that is, form a foundation for our system of belief. Given this, one may rationally believe in God (even know that he exists) despite the absence of rock-solid argument. (Plantinga, A., ‘Reason and Belief in God’ in Faith and Rationality: Reason and Belief in God, Plantinga, A., and Wolterstorff, N. (eds.) Paris, Notre Dame Press, 1983, p.65)

This may seem like a bit of a cheat, for anyone who believes in anything contentious can simply claim that their belief is basic – astrologers, tea-leaf readers and consulters of goats’ entrails can surely help themselves to the idea. Surely any pie-in-the-sky nonsense may seem to receive justification in this way.

Plantinga’s reply is simply to point out that, though belief in God is basic, it hardly follows that any kind of belief at all can count as basic. The difference is that properly basic belief has grounds. An analogy here can be found in the case of pain. Your companion groans or screams, he waves his hand around widely, he utters an expletive, you know he has been using a hammer and you saw him strike his little finger. Your belief that your companion is in pain can be seen as properly basic. It is basic because you do not work out that your companion is in pain from seeing his behaviour, you just see him in pain. Plantinga’s claim is that belief in God is rather like that. Other examples of properly basic belief include the belief that the world has existed for a long time and that there exist other minds. Again, though, you will have difficult proving these beliefs by appeal to some knock-down argument.

Argument 10j1. It is rational to uphold properly basic beliefs.2. Belief in God is properly basic.3. Hence, it is rational to believe in God.

What, though, constitute the grounds (in Plantinga’s sense) for belief in God. His examples include such things as a sense of awe as we behold the wonders of the universe and a sense of guilt and offence against God when we have done something wrong. (Think also of other aspects of religious experience.) Such ways of seeing and feeling naturally give rise to belief in God just as seeing the pain behaviour of your companion gives rise to the belief that he is feeling pain. What becomes basic here is not so much (directly) that God exists but that he created the universe, cares about what we do, and so on. Of course, if these beliefs can be rationally held, so must belief in God’s existence.

It is important to realize that none of this means that argument is irrelevant to religious belief, nor does Plantinga make the claim that it is. Rational argument may suggest, even if not prove, the existence of God. Nor can we ignore arguments against God’s existence – the argument from evil, for example. Argument and rational reflection can and do play their part in bringing someone to accept or reject God’s existence. One may still worry, however. After all, whole cultures have believed in multiple gods (the ancient Romans and Greeks, for example). Others have believed (and still do) in witchcraft and voodoo. Couldn’t all this be equally basic by Plantinga’s own standards? If so, what would be special about belief in God in the monotheistic sense? Plantinga replies that just because everyone cannot be convinced, it just does not follow that he cannot know that God (in the monotheistic sense) exists. (He claims that sin can prevent a person from believing.) However, though Plantinga is right to point out that the one thing does not follow from the other, surely believers in witchcraft and so on can say the same.

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The Implications of God’s Existence contents

God and the Problem of EvilThe philosophical problem of evil is not just that evil exists or that it is hard to know what to do about it. Rather, it is a problem about consistency of beliefs. Basically it says that belief in the existence of a God who is all loving, all knowing and all powerful is inconsistent with the belief that there is evil. So, the following remarks make an inconsistent set:

i) God is omnipotentii) God is omniscientiii) God is all lovingiv) There is evil in the world.

The problem of evil is that if (iv) is true, then at least one of (i), (ii) or (iii) must be false. They cannot all be true. Since (iv) is true, at least one of the others must be false. Why?

First, let it be noted that by 'evil' one needn't mean anything special or out of the ordinary - just the existence of anything at all which is not for the good of us will suffice, and surely there are such things and events. So, (iv) becomes

iv') Things happen which are not for our good.

This is what is said to be inconsistent with all of:

i) God is omnipotentii) God is omniscientiii) God is all-loving

All four things, according to the argument we are about to give, cannot be true. Since (iv') is true, at least one of the others must be false. How can we argue this?

The difficulty concerns that of showing how a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving could allow things to happen which are not for our good and still remain omnipotent, omniscient and all loving. Say something awful happens to you. The situation is this:

Argument 10k1. If God is omnipotent and omniscient and all-loving, then he would have stopped

it from happening because: a) he knew that it was going to happen and that it wasn't for your good, b) he could have done something to stop it from happening, and, c) since he was all loving, would have done something to stop it.

2. But he didn't stop it. 3. Hence, God is not omniscient, omnipotent and all loving.

The existence of evil can be made consistent with the existence of God but only by one of the following means:

a) God is omniscient and omnipotent but not all loving.Then we could say that he knew it was going to happen, and could have stopped it, but just didn't want to in this case.

b) God is omniscient and all loving but not omnipotent.He would then have 'seen it coming' and wanted to stop it but (just like earthly fathers) could not (on this occasion) have stopped it.

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c) God is omnipotent and all loving but not omniscient.He would then have wanted to stop it and could have stopped it if he knew it was going to happen but, on this occasion, just didn't see it coming.

So, the truth of (iv') (something happening which is not for your good) is consistent with God having a combination of any two of the listed characteristics.

Equally, it is easy to see how something’s coming about that wasn't to your own good is consistent with God having only one of the listed characteristics. What seems inconsistent is that something could happen which was not for one's good given that God has all three characteristics.

Needless to say many Christian philosophers have not been happy to concede this and have attempted to show that belief that God does possess all three characteristics is consistent with the existence of things we take to be bad for ourselves. But how can the consistency of our four statements be shown? I will deal with two responses which have been given to this, one in connection with human evil, the other in connection with natural evil.

The ‘Epistemic Distance’ ResponseThis approach can be found in John Hick (Evil and The God of Love, Glasgow, Collins, 1979 p.317.)

Argument 10l1. We can love God iff we stand at an ‘epistemic distance’ from him (not know him

directly).2. We must love God.3. Hence, we must stand at an epistemic distance from him.

If we were directly aware of God we could not love him but would be overwhelmed. Love can only be given freely. Yet then we have the following:

Argument 10m1. If there is epistemic distance from God, then there is the possibility of our doing

evil2. There is epistemic distance from God.3. Hence, there is the possibility of doing evil

The Free-Will ResponseMany people see human evil as the result of our having free wills.

Argument 10n1. If we are truly free, it is possible for us to choose evil.2. We are free.3. Hence it is possible for us to choose evil.

God is supposed to have made us free. We are not puppets on his strings. This is because we are supposed to love him and true love is something that can only be given freely (other forms of attachment, perhaps, do not need to be given freely). Alas our freedom means that we can choose to do the wrong as well as the right. Because wrong, even the down-right evil, can often be attractive, we do sometimes choose this road. God doesn’t want this for us and it will eventually lead to our downfall, but this is our fault not God’s. The problem with this response is that it is not obvious that God could not have created beings who, while free, would nevertheless have only chosen the good, or chosen the good a great deal more often than we humans actually do. (See Mackie, J., ‘Evil and Omnipotence’ in The Problem of Evil, Oxford, OUP, Adams, M. and Adams, R. (eds.), 1994, pp.33-34.)

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Against this we should remember that evil and wrongdoing can seem very attractive. Indeed, that’s why we are tempted. We do not descend into the drugs culture because we know it’s wrong or will end in our suffering but because we (falsely) believe that taking drugs will give us endless pleasure. Think of any evil you wish. Cannot one discern something in it that may result in someone’s coming under the impression that pleasure will result? It may be argued that it is not the evil of an evil act that motivates at all but something else about it that the individual (wrongly) wants. One might say that even the Devil himself does what he does not because he desires evil itself but because he desires world domination. Evil things can seem very attractive to beings who are free to choose it. Perhaps it should be little wonder that we choose it as often as we do, especially since doing evil can be easier than doing the right and good thing.

St Augustine thought that nothing that existed is actually evil. All being is good because it ultimately comes from God, and God couldn’t make evil things. Evil is to be seen as a privation of the good ‘privatio boni’. Some created things (the free ones – us) turn away from the good. He writes:

‘[W]hen the will leaves the higher and turns to the lower, it becomes bad not because the thing to which is turned is bad, but because the turning itself is perverse.’ (Augustine, The City of God, Harmondsworth, Penguin, trans. Henry Bettenson, 1984.)

‘Transworld Depravity’Another approach can be found in Alvin Plantinga (God, Freedom and Evil, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1977). Plantinga talks about ‘transworld depravity’. There are many possible worlds that God could have created in which a given free being could have existed. A being has transworld depravity if, in all the possible worlds in which he could have existed, he will freely do wrong at least once.

Argument 10o1. If we have transworld depravity, then it is it is possible that God cannot create

free beings who will always do what is right.2. We do have transworld depravity.3. Hence it is possible that God cannot create free beings who will always do what

is right.

This logical possibility is all that is needed to show that the existence of evil is consistent with the existence of God. (Recall that this was the problem.) Whether this accounts adequately for the sheer amount of pain, evil and suffering that exists is quite another matter.

The Need For ‘Law-Like’ World ResponseSo far we have dealt only with man-made evils. What about the natural ones – incurable diseases and so on? Richard Swinburn (The Existence of God, Oxford, OUP, 1991) thinks that there is a connection here with free will. It is this: we need to know the consequences of our free actions. If we could not know this, we would never have any good reason for doing one thing rather than another. However, knowledge of such consequences can only come from experience (one’s own and others). We can only learn from experience if the world acts in accordance with law-like regularity. So the argument is essentially this:

Argument 10p1. We can learn of the consequences of our actions only in a law-like environment.2. We must learn the consequences of our action.3. Hence, we must be given a law-like environment.

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We must learn that doing certain things will cause harm or even death. There cannot be exceptions to these laws because if there were, we couldn’t make rational predictions. Living in a chaotic world would be no good for us and, perhaps, not even possible. But exceptionless law is bound to result in certain bad consequences.

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MiraclesThere is a loose sense of the word 'miracle' which is employed by people who would not necessarily wish to bring God into the picture - as when, after an accident, someone may say, “It's a miracle you weren't killed”. Here, however, we are concerned with the question of whether there can be literal miracles - that is, interventions by God.

First, however, let us distinguish between two kinds of (or conceptions of) miracles:

1) divine interventions which make events go against the normal course (laws of) nature.2) divine interventions which make use of the laws of nature.

Let us call these Strong Miracles and Weak Miracles.

In both cases we may add that:

a) they are carried out by God with purpose, and b) often that purpose is taken to be one of benefit to ourselves, andc) events would not have gone the way they did without God's intervention.

An example of a Strong Miracle would be raising someone from the dead (given that the person in question was really dead), getting blood from a statue, Moses parting the Red Sea by wielding his staff, or someone being totally eaten away with cancer one minute, then getting up out of bed totally cured and full of beans the next.

An oft-quoted example of a Weak Miracle comes from R.F.Holland (I take this from JCA Gaskin, The Quest for Eternity, Penguin, 1984, p142). An express train stops just short of a child who has run on to line. The driver fainted because of a medical condition and the breaks applied automatically. The mother declares that it’s a miracle. What the difference is between a weak miracle and sheer coincidence is difficult to say, but it is often thought that to count as a miracle it must have religious significance. Then, of course, the problem is one of what this consists in.

Are Strong Miracles Possible?Sometimes it is argued that any reports of such miracles are not to be trusted because they simply cannot happen - they are impossible.

This easy dismissal will surely not do. Why? Because, Strong Miracles are surely logically possible if no more. Take the case of the cancer patient mentioned above. Such a course of events certainly goes against nature (at least as we know it) but there is at least no contradiction in the telling of it. The question, then, is whether we should think it at all likely that Strong Miracles can and do happen.

David Hume (1711-1776) proposed that there should always be a presumption against the occurrence of a miracle. Why? Because, he maintains, the evidence that something is a miracle will always be weaker than the evidence for some alternative explanation. Even if we have no other explanation on a particular occasion, this will still be so. This is because:

a) there is a lot of evidence in favour of the laws of nature, and much less evidence for miracles which run counter to those laws, andb) we know that people do tell lies and are sometimes deceived.

So, Strong Miracles should be rejected on good inductive grounds - it is always more likely that there is another explanation, that someone has lied or been deceived, than that a Strong Miracle has occurred.

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Several questions arise in connection with all this. (Following taken from Evans, K. and Teichmann, J. Philosophy: A Beginners Guide, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.):

1) Do extraordinary, seemingly inexplicable events ever happen? The answer here must be 'Yes'.

2) Can we be sure that science will ever be able to explain all such events in terms of natural law?Surely, no. It is possible that we will remain in the dark about some things for as long as we're around. Just the bare logical possibility that science will one day explain such events is not enough, for it is equally logically possible that the event is a miracle.

3) Does the occurence of inexplicable events prove God?Again, surely no. It may only prove that we are not as clever as we sometimes think we are - it does not prove that there is someone (God) who is cleverer.

4) Does the fact that such events are often beneficial demonstrate a benevolent personal God who watches over us?Again, surely there is no proof. It could just be lucky chance. After all, isn't it possible that some events which are inexplicable should go against us? In fact there seem to be 5 possibilities to consider when faced with reports of putative miracles.

1) It is a true miracle. The ‘Trust in God’ Thesis.2) Science may sometime explain the event in terms of the laws of nature. The 'Trust in Science' Thesis.3) It is pure chance - The ‘Statistical Freak’ Thesis.4) There is no explanation at all (it isn't natural, nor is it miracle). The ‘No Explanation’ Thesis.5) No such event took place The ‘No Happen’ Thesis.

Let us look at these in turn:

The 'Trust in God' ThesisA logical possibility but is open to all the questions (some of which we have considered) about the possibility of God.

The 'Trust in Science' ThesisThis may seem attractive but, remember, we need more than the mere logical possibility that science will eventually find a natural explanation and it can be argued that there are some baffling mysteries.

The 'Statistical Freak' ThesisThere is lucky chance.

The 'No Explanation' Thesis.If there is no God, then it won't be a miracle.What about natural law? Natural laws are mathematical descriptions of how the behaviour of things tends to follow patterns. But should we expect everything to do so. Perhaps there just are genuine anomalies (although science must not presuppose this). Perhaps, even, there are some things which happen without cause.

The 'No Happen' ThesisSomebody lied, someone has been taken in, someone has hallucinated.Here we must look at the evidence, but remember, if someone claims, say, that a statue wept blood, which is more likely - a) the statue did weep blood, or b) someone is lying or mistaken?

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Are Weak Miracles Possible?Take, for example the story of the train and the child. The first question to be asked is why such a course of events should be regarded as miraculous at all. After all, no law of nature has been (seemingly) broken as in the case of the Strong Miracle.

The answer has to be, of course, that the event was not just a wildly unlikely fluke, it was a fluke which resulted in a highly desirable outcome (at least for the child).

That the mother should wish to pin on it the epithet 'miracle' is perhaps understandable, but what real grounds are there? After all, both lucky and unlucky chance occurrences do take place - don't they? (Or are we to think that all such events are somehow ordained?) In that case why not take the unfortunate case to be the work of the devil? (Some do!)

Moreover, one and the same event may be fortunate from one point of view and unfortunate from another. In our story, the child was saved, but what of the train driver? If there is a God and he can do miracles, then why not a happy ending all round?

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God and MoralityThe Euthyphro dilemmaExactly what does (or can) God have to do with our morality? In discussing this question I will restrict myself to a consideration of the so-called Euthyphro Dilemma. (So called because it is raised by Plato in the dialogue of that name.) The dilemma concerns the logical relationship between God’s commands and our morality. Divine Command Theory tells us that what is right or wrong depends on the commands given us by God. Many religious people believe that this is the case. The dilemma is this: either anything God may command of us is good – which is implausible, or God’s commands are irrelevant to our moral conduct – which is something most religious people cannot accept. Either way, the dilemma poses a problem for anyone who believes there is a link between God and morality. Atheists, on the other hand, love it. Julian Baggini, for example writes, ‘To my mind, the Euthyphro dilemma is a very powerful argument against the idea that God is required for morality. Indeed, it goes further and shows that God cannot be the source of our morality, (Atheism, Oxford, OUP, 2003, p.39.) (My italics)

How the dilemma worksThe question is this:

1. Does God choose to command what is good because it is (already) good? or2. Is the command good because God chooses it?

If (1) is the case, then God seems irrelevant to morality, for the thing he commands is already good. It is good, so to speak, all by itself, without any help from God.

If (2) is the case, if it is good because God commands it – if, that is, it is God’s commanding it that makes it good - then anything God commanded would be good, no matter what it was. It seems to make what is good arbitrary. Suppose God told you that you should kill your child or wear wide ties. Then, given that you want to do what is good, that is precisely what you ought to do, like it or not. This seems simply crazy.

It’s no good just saying that God wouldn’t command of us what is evil. Perhaps he wouldn’t. But why not? Presumably because whatever we have in mind is evil anyway. Again, we start off with a conception of what is good and evil and assume that God would command only the former.

Responses to the Euthyphro DilemmaPeter Geach’s ResponsePeter Geach accepts that we do not derive all our moral knowledge from God’s commands but thinks that we do need sometimes just to be told. We know some things are bad without knowing that God forbids them. (We may sometimes be justified in doing them to prevent an even worse evil – such as lying to a mad axe-man that we are hiding his intended victim – but we know anyway that lying is a bad thing.) He does, however, think that we need God to know that we may not do evil that good may result. Geach cites adultery. We can know that adultery is generally a bad thing by rationally reflecting on its motivations and consequences. However, we cannot rationally work out when it may be justified to commit it. We cannot say with certainty, just by our own powers of reason, under what circumstances it may be acceptable. This means that our just knowing that it is generally a thing not to be done is of limited use to us. So how can we know that adultery is something we just shouldn’t do? Answer: God tells us. Geach says,

‘The rational recognition that a practice is generally undesirable and that it is best for people on the whole not even to think of resorting to it is thus in fact a promulgation to a man of the Divine law forbidding the practice, even if he does not realise that this is a promulgation of the Divine law, even if he does not believe there is a God.’ (Geach, P., God and the Soul, 1994: pp124-5.)

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This leaves us with the question as to why we should obey God’s commands. His answer: if we do not we shall be punished by God.

At this point we reach a conclusion often drawn from the Euthyphro Dilemma, namely that God can only ever function as a sanction with respect to moral doings and nothing more. We do some things because of God’s reward; we avoid other things because we fear punishment – if, that is, we believe in God in the first place. The rub here for the theist is that this seems nothing more than what Geach acknowledges is pure ‘power worship’. His response is, ‘So it is: but it is worship of the Supreme power, and as such is wholly different from, and does not carry with it, a cringing attitude towards earthly powers’. (Geach, God and the Soul, 1994, p.127.)

He may be right but it may be objected here that it is still a wrong attitude towards God. We are supposed to follow God for better reasons than blind fear of his power.

Richard Swinburne's Response First, we have to understand the difference between necessary and contingent moral truths.

A necessary moral truth is one in which there is a specific relation between:a) the natural properties of (the consequences of) some action, andb) the moral properties of that action.

Say I inflict pain on you for my own pleasure and the desire just to hurt you, then my action has those natural properties, but it would also have the moral property of being wrong. Any action that had these particular natural properties would be wrong.

A contingent moral truth is one made so by the world’s happening to be a certain way.

For example, I owe you money for some service. It is a contingent moral truth that I should pay you back. It is contingent because I may not have ordered the service. (This contingent moral truth may be said to depend on a necessary one, namely that one ought to pay one’s debts.)

Swinburn says then that necessary moral truths (torture and murder, perhaps) are obligatory independently of God’s (or anyone’s) commands. Worshipping God and supporting Christian Aid would be contingent moral truths. These are matters of divine command.

D.Z. Phillips’ ResponseWe owe certain duties to certain people because of our special relationship with them, e.g., our family. We all owe God certain duties because we all have a special relationship with him. (He made us, loves us, wants us to be with him and can reward us with paradise, etc.) One of those duties is to obey his commands, even if they go against our normal moral judgements about matters (e.g., the Biblical story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son).

Phillips does not, thus, solve the dilemma. We just have to live with any conflict between our judgements and trust God.

The God is Good ResponseIf God just is goodness (that is, they are the very same thing) then the dilemma is ill-formed, we just cannot separate the two. Julian Baggini (Atheism, Oxford, OUP, p.39.) shows that this only pushes the problem one stage further back. To say ‘God is good’ is ambiguous. There are two interpretations, enabling a restatement of the dilemma:

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1. Is God good because good is just what God is? Or2. Is God good because he has all the properties of goodness?

If (1), then goodness is rendered arbitrary, for goodness would be just whatever God was, whatever he was. (Even if he were like the Devil).

If (2), then the properties of goodness must be specifiable independently of God. (How else would we know what the properties of goodness were?) This would mean that goodness does not depend on God’s existence.

Logical and Causal DependenceIt looks as though the dilemma is undeniable. Either goodness is an arbitrary matter (surely not a plausible response) or goodness is specifiable independently of God. We can specify goodness without reference to God; we can know that something is good without any reference to God. After all, isn’t feeding a starving person just good with or without God? Isn’t torturing simply for pleasure evil with or without God? But then, just what has God got to do with it? Goodness and God are logically independent. Perhaps the theist could take the bold step of not worrying about this. From the fact that goodness is specifiable independently of God doesn’t mean that God cannot still be perfectly good (in the sense that it is his nature never to choose evil). Nor does it follow that God couldn’t be the one to have caused good things to have happened or caused us to be free to choose good. Note, that if it is God’s nature never to do or create evil but only the good, then God is in some sense, not free to choose good in the way we are. It would also mean that he couldn’t be good in the same way we may sometimes be. (We are sometimes good because we freely choose the good.) However, the theist could simply say that this doesn’t matter. God doesn’t need to be free, not does he need to be good in the way we are. All that is required is that he be the creator of good things. If all this is so then we could demand that we always obey God’s laws, assured that in doing so we are following the best possible model.

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Some Interesting Passages contents

If creatures have only the power to benefit and not the power to hurt each other, they obviously lack any strong responsibility for each other. To bring out the point by a caricature - a world in which 1 could choose whether or not to give you sweets, but not whether or not to break your leg or make you unpopular is not a world in which I have a very strong influence on your destiny, and so not a world in which I have a very full responsibility for you.Swinburn, R. in Cahn and Shatz (eds.) Contemporary Philosophy of Religion (Oxford; OUP 1982 p.8.)

If God is to bestow upon man a kind of freedom which is not just artificial but really significant, He must allow man a wide scope of choices and actions. Indeed, the kind of freedom which is basic to the accomplishment of great and noble actions is the kind of freedom which also allows the most atrocious deeds. In creating man and giving him free will, God thereby created an astonishing range of possibilities for both the creation and the destruction of value. Although some freely chosen evils sometimes have more disastrous consequences than intended, others seem to be motivated by the very desire to do irreparable damage. Perhaps this second kind of free choice is the true love of evil.

Peterson M., Evil and the Christian God; Grand Rapids: Baker (1982, p.103)

[1]f the conception of human free will is taken to involve the bringing about really gratuitous evil (specifically, moral evil), then God cannot completely prevent or eliminate gratuitous evil without severely diminishing free will. That would be logically impossible. At stake here is not merely the ability of humans to choose among options, but the ability to choose among significant kinds of options: between goods and evils, even the highest goods and most terrible evils. Thus, free will is most significant - and most fitting for the special sort of creature man is - if it includes the potential for damnable choices and actions. This is part of the inherent risk in God’s program for man .... God cannot always meticulously override human choices in order to prevent or eliminate their gratuitous evil effects and still protect a significant, free will and [those] who also insist that God must not allow any gratuitous evil . . . are unwittingly asking for the impossible.

Peterson, op.cit p.104

If we define pointless or gratuitous evils as evils which are not logically or causally necessary for there being a greater good, it follows that some instances of pointless or gratuitous evils, i.e., those whose possibility is necessary for there being a greater good or preventing a greater evil, are compatible with God's existence and goodness. For example, it might be argued that a world operating with regularity according to natural laws is a necessary condition for the greater good of the realisation of moral values. But the former in turn necessitates the possibility of such natural evils as fawns suffering. The suffering may be pointless or gratuitous, but the possibility of it is a necessary condition of there being that great good. Thus, the existence of pointless suffering whose possibility is necessary for there being a greater good or preventing a greater evil is compatible with the necessity that God eliminate as much evil as he can without losing a greater good or bringing about a greater evil, and hence with God's existence and goodness. Reichenbach, S., Evil and a Good God, New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 1982, p.39

[If God continuously intervened and corrected human affairs] it would mean that no wrong action could ever have bad effects, and that no piece of carelessness or ill judgement in dealing with the world could ever lead to harmful consequences. If a thief were to steal a million pounds from a bank instead of anyone being made poorer thereby, another million pounds would appear from nowhere to replenish the robbed safe; and this, moreover, without causing any inflationary consequences. If one man tried to murder another bullet would melt innocuously into thin air, or the blade of his knife to paper. Fraud, deceit, conspiracy, and treason would somehow always leave fabric of society undamaged. Anyone driving at

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breakneck speed along a road and hitting a pedestrian would leave his victim miraculously unharmed; or if one slipped and fell through a fifth-floor window, gravity would be part suspended and he would float gently to the ground. And so on. We can at least begin to imagine a world custom-made for the avoidance of all suffering. But the daunting fact that emerges is that in such a world moral qualities wound longer have any point or value. There would be nothing wrong with stealing because no one could ever lose anything by it; there would be no such crime murder, because no one could ever be killed; and in short none of the terms connoting modes of injury - such as cruelty, treachery, deceit, neglect, assault, injustice, unfaithfulness - would retain its meaning. If to act wrongly means, basically, to harm someone, there would be no way in which anyone could harm anyone else, but there would also be no way in which anyone could benefit anyone else, since there would be no possibility of any lack or danger. It would be a world without need for the virtues of self-sacrifice, care for others, devotion to the public good, courage, perseverance, skill, or honesty. It would indeed be a world in which such qualities, having no function to perform, would never come into existence. Unselfishness would never be evoked in a situation which no one was ever in real need or danger. Honesty, good faith, commitment to the right would never be evoked in circumstances in which no one could suffer any harm, so that there were no bad consequences of dishonesty, bad faith or moral vacillation. Courage would never be evoked in the absence of any challenges and obstacles. Truthfulness would never be evoked in a world in which to tell a lie never had any ill effects. And so on. Perhaps most important of all, the capacity to love would never be developed, except in a very limited sense of the word, in a world in which there was no such thing as suffering. Hick, J., Evil and the God of Love, New York: Harper & Row, 1977, pp.324-5

It cannot be too strongly insisted that a world which is to be a moral order must be a physical order characterised by law or regularity. The theist is only concerned to invoke the fact that law-abidingness ... is an essential condition of the world being a theatre of moral life. Without such regularity in physical phenomena there could be no probability to guide us: no prediction, no prudence, no accumulation of ordered experience, no pursuit of premeditated ends, no formation of habit, no possibility of character or of culture. Our intellectual faculties could not have developed.... And without rationality, morality is impossible. Tennant, F.R., Philosophical Theology, Cambridge: C.U.P., 1928, pp. 199-200

Theists argue that God cannot guarantee that truly free creatures will only choose good. He cannot make creatures whom he can guarantee will only will the good. Alvin Plantinga writes:

Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if he does so, then they are not significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creaturescapable of moral evil; and He cannot give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor His goodness for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good. Plantinga, A., God, Freedom and Evil, Grand Rapids: William Eardmans, 1974, p.30

‘There was a mysterious presence in nature ... which was my greatest delight, especially when as happened from time to time, nature became lit up from the inside with something that came from beyond itself’.(Alston 2000, p.383, quoting Beardsworth 1997, p.19).

‘I was at prayer on a festival of the glorious Saint Peter when I saw Christ at my side - or, to put it better, I was conscious of Him, for neither with the eyes of the body nor with those of the soul did I see anything.’ (St Teresa 1515-1582, Quoted in Peterson et a1. (eds) 1996, p.7)

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‘The question, `Which is the true reality, the one revealed to us in mystical experiences or the one revealed to us in our non-mystical experiences?,' is really a value question and cannot be settled by any logical means. What a man takes to be the really real is a value judgement expressive of what experiences have the greatest significance for him.’(Gale, Richard ‘Mysticism and Philosophy’, in Cahn & Shatz (eds.) Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, 1982, p.122)

Other Sources on Religious ExperienceThe theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965, 'Systematic Theology' 3 vols 1951-63) tells us that religious ideas and experiences can only be expressed in symbols. (A symbol conveys the power and meaning of what it symbolises, as opposed to a sign, which is merely conventional.) Tillich maintained that a religious experience had 2 elements:

a) a material basis - which could be studies by scienceb) a sense of conveying ultimate value

It is (b) which makes the experience religious. It is, says Tillich, experience:

i) not of a being but of being itself - one experiences being (the whole of existence) in a particular way - as having meaning and purposeii) of 'ultimate concern'. God cannot be experienced in a detatched, impartial way but as something of supreme significance.

The Jewish philosopher/theologian - Martin Buber (1878-1965, 'I and Thou' 1922, tr. 1970) made the distinction betwee 'I-It' language and 'I-Thou' language. Religious language is an example of the latter. One is not speculating about something (God) but addressing God.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) - a German absolute idealist philosopher - said that religious experience could not involve coming to have knowledge of the transcendent, such an attempt would be futile. Rather, religious experience involves feelings of dependence, of feeling a wider dimension which puts things in a different light. One cannot reason about these things - that would destroy their significance. Rather, one intuits them.

Rudolph Otto ('The Idea of the Holy', 1917) maintained that religious experience was of something essentially other than the world as we orinarily know it, something awesome yet of supreme value - a 'Mysterium Tremendum'. Experience of the holy cannot adequately be described - you just have to have it. It is like any experience of wonder and beauty. If someone doesn't see things in that way, no description or argument will convince them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, 1921) wrote:6.44: It is not how things are in the world that is mystical but that it exists.6.45: To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole - a limited whole - it is this that is mystical.

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Points For Discussion

Can we really imagine something coming from nothing? Take this passage from the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe:

‘...if I imagine a rabbit coming into being without a parent rabbit, well and good: I can imagine a rabbit coming into being and observing that there is no parent rabbit about. But what am I to imagine if I imagine a rabbit coming into being without a cause? Well, I just imagine a rabbit coming into being. That this is the imagination of a rabbit coming into being without a cause is nothing but, as it were, the title of the picture. Indeed, I can form an image and give my picture that title. But from my being about to do that, nothing whatever follows about what is possible to suppose “without contradiction or absurdity” as holding in reality.’ Anscombe, G.E.M., ‘ “Whatever has a beginning of existence must have a cause’: Hume’s argument exposed.’ ”Analysis 34, 1974.

1. Write a few sentences about what you think Anscombe’s purpose is in this passage and whether she has a good point. Consider: a) Can we picture something being causeless? b) What is it we do picture when we picture something seemingly causeless? c) What if we cannot picture something as being causeless? Does this mean it cannot be causeless? d) Is it possible to conceive something as causeless? What would make such an attempt successful?

2. There is something rather than nothing. We tend to think that nothing should have, so to speak, default status. Then we have to account for the existence of something. Why shouldn’t matters be the other way round? Why shouldn’t something have the default status and nothingness (if that were the case) need explaining? (Note that it is beside the point that if there were nothing, there would be no one around to pose the question.)

3. Can God really be omnipotent? If so, can he create a stone massive enough that even he could not (miraculously) lift it. If he can then there is something he cannot do (lift the stone), therefore he cannot be omnipotent. If not, then there is also something he cannot do (make the stone), therefore he cannot be omnipotent. Either way he cannot be omnipotent. What does this argument show us, both about God and about the concept of omnipotence?

4. Can God have desires? For instance, can he want our love? If he can, then when the desire is fulfilled, he is surely changed. If they are unfulfilled, then is he frustrated? How can one have desires if one is beyond time? Moreover doesn’t it mean that God is subject to change after all?

5. It may be wondered how God could move matter if he is not physical, but how do you move your arm? (I do not mean to enquire as to the physical processes, nerve firings and so on.)

6. Some cosmologists think that they have a secular answer to the question as to why the universe exists. Matter arose spontaneously from a quantum fluctuation. Don’t worry about understanding this fully. Do you think that it can defeat the cosmological argument given earlier? If not, why not? (Think about what creation ex-nihilo really means.)

7. Is Swinburn’s Teleological Argument subject to any of Hume’s criticisms?

8. Would you accept Wainwright’s checks for religious experience?

9. Could God have made a law-like world with less horrendous consequences?

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10. Swinburn goes on to argue that God is to us as parents are to children. Parents have the right to allow one child to suffer somewhat for the good of others. (One may suffer in not being taken out because his brother is ill and needs tending.) Can this make sense of the amount of evil done in the world?