Ah, once again a lengthy reply. Substantial, but lengthy.
I would complain, except you keep the quality of thought and response so high, I can hardly object. But forgive me if it takes me a day or two to reply.
Astro Cat wrote: ↑Wed Aug 17, 2022 9:56 am
I can imagine a response, "well, it could be better."
That wouldn't be my choice. It's no better that the line somebody gives one when things go badly, and they say, "Well, it could be worse." But it's probably true, though not importantly so. And it can come off as more than a little callous.
Let me put this part of the argument into perspective.
1) I asked, "What about God being God makes it that we ought to value the same things as God?"
2) You said, "God created us for His purpose, and we would fail to achieve "the best" trajectory of life if we failed to actualize that purpose."
3) I asked, "The best according to whom? God?"
4) You said, "Well, He would be the only one who could forsee that, of course," which I'm taking as an affirmative answer (so yes, according to God)
But the problem is this: what would "the best trajectory" mean? "Best" doesn't mean anything without some metric. What is that metric?
A hammer is measured by its application to pounding nails, or doing other things hammers are supposed to do. A computer is measured by the power of its processor, the precision of its graphics, and so on -- all the things a computer was made to do.
A person is measured by the metric of
what God has made him or her to do or be.
Now, in some ways, that's the same for everyone, because everybody is a human being, and certain duties and functions devolve upon us all, in common (like the duty not to kill anybody); but it's equally true that there is also a particular role to which every human being is uniquely called, because nobody's life is exactly the same as anybody else's (like the duty for Cat to deliver on the potential God has specifically put in her, as a budding academic, perhaps -- not for me to judge, though).
The metric, then, is how close one is to actualizing each of these.
I considered a few things like "happiness,"
No, you're right; that won't do. Happiness is too random. And it's got to be clear that some people feel "happy" while doing evil (at least if we use that word in a conventional way).
I considered "a sense of fulfillment,"
Same problem, really. Our "feelings" are quite treacherous, sometimes.
Imagine being in court, and telling the Judge, "But your honour, when I was embezzling, I was rich and comfortable, and I felt happy and fulfilled."
I think we'd be going to jail, don't you?
What if our "best trajectories" from our own considerations where we are happiest and thrive the most is different from God's "best trajectories?"
We'll come to that shortly.
Hmm, I know you were hesitant to get personal with this, but I really want to bring up a glaringly obvious example. A lot of Christians think homosexuality is somehow immoral, ostensibly something God does not want. Yet I didn't choose this, I can't help but to feel attraction to whom I feel and not feel attraction to whom I don't.
Since you, yourself, bring up this example, I will honour it. I trust you understand my goal is not to be disputatious or provocative, of course, but to be forthcoming and responsive. And I think it's a fair question.
But just before I answer, may we take one second to note the form of the objection? It looks rather essentialist, if I can say that without offence. It looks like what you're saying is, "Homosexuality is an
essential feature that
cannot be changed." You ruled out any possibility you "chose" it, and I don't think your society has "constructed" that role for a person, rather than, say, the role of a trans-man or a heterosexual...it seems to "construct" all sorts of roles, doesn't it? So it might have constructed a different one, or a person might have chosen differently, if either of the latter two explanations hold water. What do we do now with the Postmodern assertion that these roles are all constructed and open to choice?
But let us continue, because it gets more particular and personal, and I should 'hear' the rest of your comment before attempting a reasonable response...
Ostensibly God's "best trajectory" for me would be in a direction I literally physically
can't (in terms of arousal) go in. How could God's trajectory for me be "the best" when I'm very happy, satisfied, smitten by my partner, my girlfriend, likely wife soon enough? I promise I'm not going to get mad or damage our friendship and rapport over admonitions against homosexuality. Remember that it's cruelty that I abhor, not differing opinions. (Just don't tell me if you vote for laws that are oppressive to me, that'll be don't ask don't tell
)
You've been most reasonable and sensible. I have no doubt that you will do exactly as you say. And this gives me liberty to speak frankly, without fear of offense. So I'll be direct, but I also intend to be kind.
You might, at this point, expect me to direct you to particular Biblical passages that deal with the subject, might you not? But I'm actually not going to do that -- partly because I know you probably know them, but more because I don't think that gets to the heart of your concern.
So let me say something perhaps a little more unexpected: I believe you.
I believe you when you say that certain things make you feel "happy," and "satisfied" and that you "can't" change things about yourself that direct you a particular way. And I believe you not merely because I've found you honest and sincere (though I have), but because this is also exactly what the Bible itself says. It says that without God, it is impossible for a person to be anything other than he or she is.
This is what Jesus Himself was referring to, when He said, "You must be born again." That is, what every person needs, in order to become any different from what he or she is, is an actual "dying" to the old person, and a reconstitution of being by the action of God Himself. He needs a total reconstruction, not merely some set of laws and prohibitions to follow while remaining essentially the same person he or she is. And there is no alternative to that, He said: "You
must be born again." It's not an optional thing. There are no alternatives. For a person to become other than she is, or he is, she or he must undergo and actual change of nature conducted by the hand of God Himself. And absent undergoing such a change, the whole process will remain as obscure and seemingly-impossible as locating where the wind is blowing from (That's exactly the analogy He used in speaking on that occasion, to Nicodemus, in John 3). It will simply remain a permanent mystery how anybody could ever be other than they are.
And I could multiply examples of this for you. One of my friends was in a bike gang and ran drugs, for example. Another man I knew was on the street, as a hopeless alcoholic. I even met a man who had killed his wife. And if you met any of them, you could see in their faces, their voices, their whole demeanor, that something profound was changing in them, making them something very different from what they essentially had been.
But I don't need to resort to such dramatic examples. I know from my own experience the truth of what the Bible says, that a person truly "born again" by the Spirit of God is a very different person from who he would otherwise be. And while it might not be as easily recognizable to others in my case, I can assure you that I know my own heart. And I was quite a different person before I met Christ. I have no doubt I would not be here, talking to you about this, had my life never taken that sharp turn. And like the examples I listed above, I'm a man-in-process, too...not at all yet perfect, but beyond doubt, being changed by Something much greater than I can understand.
Can a person who is a homosexual change? Can she even want to change, and become a different kind of person? I think she can't. I accept your word that such a thing is impossible. Yet with God, as the Bible says, "all things are possible." With God, essentialism is not fate.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:1) You say, "...so nothing we have or choose is owed to anyone else."But this begs the question that anything we have or choose is "owed" to anyone at all, doesn't it?
No, because we can't help having to orient our lives somehow. We are going to have to make value judgments, organize priorities, arrange hierarchies of importance, set goals, establish aims, and so forth. The alternative is not to live at all.
So we're going to have to make something the basis of that orienting. Our "oughts," even if only our instrumental ones, are going to have to relate to some goal or aim we take as obligatory or important in some way. And we can do that unthinkingly, on auto-pilot, as many people seem to do, or else we can question and examine the point or aim toward which we've been orienting ourselves, and decide whether or not it's the right one.
So I come back to my question. If God is not the center of our "oughts," who is? Who's the next candidate on the list? What do you refer to, when you orient your choices, values and actions? Let's move that from the unconscious level to the conscious.
I orient my choices by my values, so I guess the answer to your question would be "ourselves," for the most part. If I'm in a situation and I don't know what to do, then I check my values for what I should do: even if the answer is sometimes to check what the experts say, that's listening to a value. I would say that even when a Christian or a Muslim listens to an expert, they are first checking their values (they value what their religious experts say).
Okay. "By my values," you say.
But did you not also say your values are "constructed" for you by society, and presumably maybe evenby a society that is also "oppressive"? Or were your values actually freely "chosen"? But if they were merely chosen, why couldn't you have chosen differently? Indeed, why could you not simply choose to do so now?
This is a serious problem: what makes the "values" I happen to have at a given moment indebted to follow them? How can they amount to an "ought"?
Needless to add: I don't mean merely
instrumentally, of course. I mean, what makes my "values" more important than the "values" I had yesterday, or might have tomorrow, or that others might have? Why do I owe them to honour them?
Immanuel Can wrote:Whether or not I owe somebody gratitude does not at all depend on my feeling that I do.
I don't accept that someone would have an obligation to someone else unless they feel one.
Well, I think most people intuitively think we would.
For instance, if somebody gives somebody else a gift, we tell children they "ought" to say "Thank you." That's routine, isn't it? Or if somebody had given me a huge benefit...such as if a stalwart thesis advisor had helped one through a difficult thesis to a successful defense, wouldn't one owe a small token of thanks? Wouldn't one feel one ought to at least
say "Thanks"? Wouldn't one be a bad person if one failed in that duty? Wouldn't that make me self-centered and ungrateful if I did that? At least, wouldn't most people think so?
I think it's pretty obvious that practically everyone would say that in such cases, gratitude was "owed," and owed regardless of the feelings of the person involved. In fact, the
absence of a feeling of gratitude, in such cases, along with the appropriate duties of expressing it, would likely be taken as a significant character failing on the part of the person who didn't "feel" she needed to be grateful.
But!
As has been my point all along, if this is the basis, this one thing [the argument from power] that makes sense, then the noncognitivist was right all along: oughts are just hypothetical imperatives based on values and backed up by power.
No, not quite.
The fact that it's the only argument that "makes sense" to a person who, by her own admittance, is without God simply tells you that this is the only argument that can even make sense to a person without God.
It tells you no more than that. It doesn't tell you that the noncognitivist is
right; it tells you what she
cannot see. The "power" argument is the only argument that "adds up" to a person outside of Christ.
Yes, I understand. And I knew that would be the case. Nietzsche already laid that fact out for us both to inspect. For that reason, "God is dead" comes before
morality is dead (or "beyond good and evil"). And "will to power" is all that's left.
Immanuel Can wrote:Astro Cat wrote:Ah, but then if the question is "what if we don't care what God desires..."
Then you get to be wrong, obviously.
But if "wrong" just means "not in accordance with what God wishes," if it's not a property but just a description of what God thinks, why would we care about being wrong?
Because God doesn't "think" things that aren't true. We do.
...there's no reason you should adopt Cat's wishes instead of your own?
There's something even more: there's no reason IC should adopt even IC's wishes.
It's God who's right, not IC. I will only be as right or wrong as the extent to which I have adopted God's view.
Why should we "owe" our own wishes anything? It's animals who live by their insticts: people have been granted to use cognition, reasoning, deferring of gratification, planning, self-control, and other such faculties that animals completely lack. If we revert to living my our instincts, are we more or less human than we were before we did?
Why then do we valourize our own "wishes"? I see no grounds for doing that.
Where is the argument that we ought to align with God's wishes?
Oh, that's simple: because He's inevitably right, and I'm often wrong.
The problem is that you're committed to defining most of these terms by accordance with God's wishes or not
I think we should stick to what I actually said. And I said that God's wishes for us, as expressed in commandments and morals, are grounded in the character of who He is, which is the Righteous One. So if you want to "define" terms like "goodness" etc., we should say, "That which is harmonious with the nature and character of God is what 'right' is."
That's an important distinction: because I can see your mind is snapping back to the sort of Euthyphro perspective, the "right-is-what-the-gods-command" perspective. And that's not what I'm saying at all. "Good" is not what God merely "thinks" is good, or "values." It's a product of
who He is.
So I'm not saying He values faithfulness because He
thinks faithfulness is good, as if He thought it in a detached way; I'm saying faithfulness is good, because
He is the Faithful One. I'm saying truthfulness is good, because
He is the Truthful One. I'm saying love is good, because
God is love (to quote 1 John).
Does that make it more clear?
If rights are endowed by God, then they are in accordance with God's wishes. But that suffers from the same problem: what if we don't care what God wishes?
Then, very likely, we will tend to deny others their rights. It won't mean they don't
have them, because men neither can confer rights nor legitimately take them away. They're not human artifacts.
It means we will deny other people the
benefit and enjoyment of their rights. It's that we will be found to be fighting against God, as Locke says.
The circularity of your position is in every term you try to use.
The "circularity" you perceive is a product of your mistake about what I'm saying, not a feature of what I'm saying. You seem to be snapping back in your mind to the Divine Command or Euthryphro perspectives all the time, and expecting that I will mount a defense of them.
Sadly, they are not my perspective. I feel no inclination to defend them, and see the incoherencies you also perceive in them. We are agreeing about all that. However, as I say, they are not my position. It may simply be that the position I'm articulating is so unfamilar to you (perhaps) that you're not able to resist the inclination to slot them back into the old categories. But the truth is that they don't belong there.
So I'll say again:
"good" is what is consonant with the nature and character of God.
"Good" is not merely "what the gods love," (Socrates), nor even "what God commands" (as in, say legalism, Pharisaism or Shariah). "Good" is
who God is. And while He does make that known in terms of commandments (among other things, because that's not exclusive) anything He commands merely flows out of that.
Is that clearer?