#44: Absolute Values (Again)

A couple of my friends have expressed discomfort with my insistence that morality is no more than preference. While I have addressed this issue already in prior posts, it seems important enough to take one more run at it. Let me approach it this time by way of a couple of purely logical points.

I

Many years ago, a philosopher named Antony Flew identified what he called a logical “misdemeanor.” He didn’t give the misdemeanor a name, but he described it in a couple of paragraphs. I have always felt that this misuse of logic deserved much greater emphasis than it has received, and for this reason I have given it a name of its own. I call it, for reasons that will become apparent, the “No-True-Briton-Move” (NTBM).

The NTBM capitalizes on a logical ambiguity present in ordinary language. The syntax of a declarative sentence does not by itself reveal whether the sentence is being intended as an empirical truth or as a stipulative definition. For example, the sentence “All Britons drink tea” could be an empirical generalization, on the one hand, or a stipulation with regard to the meaning of “Briton,” on the other. This ambiguity can be used in a deceptive manner, hence Flew’s referring to it as a “misdemeanor.” We can see the misdemeanor at play in the following elaboration.

Let us imagine an ambitious young “social scientist” who has designed a study on the tea-drinking habits of Britons (supported lavishly, of course, by the public purse!). His working hypothesis is: All Britons drink tea. His methodology is simple; he has defined “Briton” by the possession of a valid British passport and has accumulated a small army of undergraduates to travel out into Britain everywhere, even into the remotest regions, knocking on doors, and interviewing the inhabitants. “Do you possess a British passport,” they ask, and if the answer is yes, they follow up by asking whether the person drinks tea, and recording the response.

Imagine further that the study is completed, all the responses tabulated, compiled, and statistically analyzed, AND, to the delight of the International Tea Cartel, it turns out that all the interviewed Britons do drink tea! Our social scientist concludes that his empirical hypothesis has been confirmed, his promotion assured, his career guaranteed, and his grant acquiring ability significantly enhanced. He expects, not without reason, that he will soon be invited to pledge for the man-made global warming fraternity.

Imagine finally, however, that just as our ambitious social scientist is happily about to board his plane bound for home at Harvard, a lone figure comes running after him waving a valid British passport and screaming “I drink COFFEE!” At which point, our social scientist replies coolly, “Then, you’re no true Briton,” and flies off into the happy skies. This should be very puzzling, since an empirical generalization is in principle falsifiable by even one contrary case!

What happened? Our social scientist converted what was his hypothesis from an empirical generalization into a stipulation. This meant that he abandoned his initial experimental criterion for being British (the passport) and replaced it with drinking tea. He was able to do this, because the English sentence “All Britons drink tea” has no syntactical indicator showing which of the two it is intended to be (though the presence of the word "true" in his response should certainly raise a flag). His shift allowed him to ignore the contrary case and to make his generalization immune to any further evidence. This is cheating.

That’s our first logical point. I will apply it to “morality” in due time, but for the moment, please be patient as I deal with the second logical point.

II

This point is famously due to David Hume and in philspeak it is summarized as “Y’ can’t get an ought from an is.”

The point is both terribly simple and terribly effective.

When we have an empirical claim, a claim about the actual world, that needs justification, we have two and only two expedients at our disposal: we can use deduction or we can use induction. That’s all there is. And, in addition, the best we can hope for from our justification is an increase in the probability of the claim in question.

But Hume adds a further clarification to the process of justification, namely, that the proposition being justified be of the same kind as the propositions doing the justifying.

The propositions doing the justifying are limited to being ones stating facts. Only facts can be used to justify. “Facts” are existing states of affairs. Thus, “Herbert (the Briton) drinks tea,” states a fact if and only if that sentence is true.

BUT, “Everyone ought to honor his mother and his father” does NOT state a fact about the world in any way at all!

This is signaled by the substitution of the word “ought” for the word “is.”

And what this means is that the justification of moral sentences is impossible.

Repeating why this is: 1) only facts can be used to justify, 2) the justified must be of the same kind as the justifying, and 3) moral sentences are not statements of fact. Therefore, 4) moral sentences cannot be justified.

To be completely fair, moral sentences can be justified by appeal to other moral sentences. The problem is that such justification can never be linked in any persuasive way to the actual world, the world of facts. In brief, such justification is ultimately either without any foundation or merely circular.

III

Now we can apply point one to morality.

Both in nature (the world of facts) and in morality (the world that “ought” to be) we find generalizations. In nature, our best generalizations are what we call “laws of nature” (of which the law of gravity is a paradigm example). In morality, we have our paradigm examples in the ten commandments (“Thou shallt not …”). Please note that the “shallt nots” are simply archaic versions of moral generalizations: “No one ought to do …”

Notice first that there seems to be a similarity in the ways we come to the generalizations in each area. In the case of nature, say gravity in particular, we measure the rate of fall in different places and under different conditions and then generalize the result: a freely falling body accelerates at a rate of 32’ per second for every second that it falls. This is called an inductive generalization, and the most important thing to notice is that such a generalization remains vulnerable to even a single counter-example. This means that all it would take to invalidate the law of gravity would be one single instance of a freely falling body accelerating at some speed other than 32’ per second.

Our moral generalizations also begin with observations. We note that most if not all people are against generalized coveting of neighbors’ wives; hence we generalize “Thou shallt not…thy neighbor’s wife.”

BUT, and this is a BIG but, there is a difference between the empirical and moral generalizations. This difference is that while the first are always still vulnerable to counter-example, the latter are treated as if they are not.

IF moral generalizations were treated like empirical generalizations, they should FALL as soon as one of us says, as Satan said to God, “thanks, but no thanks.” Instead of that, what happens is that the moral generalizations are treated as immune to counter-example. How is this done? Why is it done?

The how is easy to answer: the NTBM! A logical misdemeanor that capitalizes on the ambiguity of modal intent in the declarative sentence.

Why is it done? So that the generalization can be used to bludgeon people into what a majority thinks is the proper way to behave.

Once the NTBM has been implemented, generalizations that were empirical become what the moralists like to call “absolute.”

“Absolute” generalizations are the moral equivalent of stipulative generalizations: these generalizations cannot be rejected because we say they can’t!

IV

And so, my friends, this is why there are no “absolute” moral principles, rules, values, commandments, etc..

Addendum

Very briefly, just a review of why God’s existing would make no difference to the moral picture at all.

If, indeed, God did exist, then this would be no more than one more fact about the world. If God were a natural entity, then it would be an additional natural fact; if God were a supernatural entity, then it would be a supernatural fact. Each of these possibilities carries with it insurmountable difficulties, in particular that I doubt any sense can be made of the notion of a “fact” outside of nature.

All the terrible conceptual difficulties in these notions aside, however, this one final point suffices: as long as we are considered free, God’s existence would be irrelevant to our moral issues and dilemmas.

The reason is that we can freely choose to do what God and others consider evil. When we do so, God’s only recourse is power. God can punish us. But this just makes God a very powerful, perhaps infinitely powerful, enemy of the free man.

This surely cannot be what the devout have in mind, eh?