Intro

Your last post was helpful in clarifying your position on some of the philosophical issues we have been discussing.  It was not entirely clear to me exactly how your own beliefs relate to those of Socrates and Confucius, but I assume, based on what you say, that you would fall somewhere in between Socrates’s form of skepticism, which entails a radical questioning of tradition, and Confucius’s form of skepticism, which entails an acceptance of tradition.  I acknowledge the points you make that there can be degrees of reasonableness of beliefs, and that, even if we do not know what we should do, “we can guess and act on guesses.”  As I have thought about it, I realized that it was not entirely correct for me to say that holding to ethical beliefs without any metaphysical explanation for why they are objectively true necessarily means having absolutely no reason or explanation for why one should think those ethical beliefs are true.  One could still have some sort of reason for holding to their ethical beliefs: the authority of tradition.  Before proceeding further, it may be helpful at this point for me to clarify my own thoughts about the proper place of the authority of tradition with regards to reason and knowledge.

Reason and the Authority of Tradition

None of us comes into this world as an independent, autonomous, rational mind, a blank slate prepared to neutrally and objectively observe the world, think for ourselves, and form our own set of beliefs.  Rather, each of us comes into this world as a child, who absorbs the beliefs they are taught by their parents, community, and society. The most reasonable thing for a child to do is to accept what they are taught by authority figures, who have more knowledge and experience than they do.  Gradually, as our minds and brains develop and we get older, we develop the ability to think for ourselves, discovering new truths and questioning some of the beliefs we have been taught. As adults, our minds become, relatively speaking, independent and autonomous. But even if we decide to skeptically question our beliefs and subject them to critical examination, it is not possible to do so by withdrawing into a position of neutral objectivity and building our network of beliefs from scratch.  Rather, each of us already always has a network of beliefs which begins as a network of beliefs we have accepted on the basis of authority; when we change our minds about something or adopt new beliefs, we modify that network of beliefs, rather than forming a brand new network of beliefs. So, it is simply not reasonable to tell people to never believe anything based on the authority of tradition, since this is impossible. What we can do, though, is gradually to take particular beliefs we have accepted on faith in authority and subject them to critical scrutiny in order to assess whether it is reasonable to continue believing these things or not.  This is, I take it, what you mean when you advocate skepticism, and I am certainly in favor of this kind of critical thinking as well.  

Believing things based on the authority of tradition is necessary and inevitable for children, but does the authority of tradition have any importance for adult minds?  I believe that it does. It is common for post-Enlightenment modern Westerners to portray reason and tradition as two opposing forces, with the essence of reason being understood as repudiating tradition and thinking for oneself.  It is certainly true that human traditions can be wrong and that new discoveries or insights that contradict traditional wisdom and teaching may get us closer to the truth. Sometimes, the reasonable thing to do is to go against tradition.  But often, the opposite is the case; often, the most reasonable thing for an individual to do is to bow to the authority of tradition.  

If we want to be reasonable people, if we want to seek the truth, it is important that each of us have a healthy dose of intellectual humility.  Each of us is limited on knowledge and prone to making errors in our reasoning. Each of us also exists in a very particular historical context, with very particular, historically contingent influences that have shaped us.  Furthermore, each of us has our own personal idiosyncrasies and habits of thought, and, as you point out, it is not possible to sharply separate our reason from our emotions, intuitions, aesthetic sense, and other nonrational¹Note the distinction between nonrational and irrational.  Our emotions may be unreliable, and they sometimes point us in an irrational direction, but other times they point us in a direction that is perfectly rational. And of course, even our reasoning faculty may point us in an irrational direction, if we make errors in our reasoning. faculties.  For all of these reasons, each of us should recognize that, even if something seems reasonable to me, I could very well be mistaken. So, if we want to seek the truth, we should consult the wisdom of tradition. If I come up with an idea that contradicts what many other thoughtful people have said, it is unlikely that I am correct and tradition is wrong.  Now, it is certainly possible that tradition is wrong and that the new or relatively idiosyncratic idea I have come up with is actually true, and there can be value and importance in being willing to call traditional ideas into question.  But the burden of proof should be on me to say why tradition is wrong and I am right, not the other way around. If I come up with an idea that contradicts what tradition says, if I want to be reasonable, I should be cautious about departing from tradition and should make sure to carefully investigate the reasons for my idea and the reasons others have held to the traditional view before advocating my idea with any confidence.

Now, so far I have been speaking of tradition in a rather abstract sense.  The more complicated truth is that each of us is part of (or at least influenced by) multiple traditions of varying size and significance that intersect and overlap in a variety of ways.  There are family traditions, community traditions, societal traditions, religious traditions, traditions of particular subcultures, as well as traditions of particular trades or intellectual disciplines, and so forth.  Not all of these traditions are of equal importance or weight, and some may only affect relatively narrow aspects of our life or thought. We also may in some cases choose our tradition, transferring from one community to another, or from one tradition of thought to another after changing our minds about some fundamental issues.  But we can never fully escape being under the influence of the authority of tradition(s), even if in some ways we radically innovate.  

Tradition and Ethics

So, if someone holds to ethical beliefs simply because these are the ethical ideas they have learned from their family upbringing, their community, and/or their society, is this, as I seemed to suggest in my last post, irrational?  Well, not necessarily. There are, as you pointed out, degrees of reasonableness. If someone says, “I do not know why this is right and wrong, but this is how I was raised and this is what most people think is right and wrong, so this is what I will believe about ethics,” this is not necessarily unreasonable.  Such a position, after all, is where all of us start as children, and, even as adults, we can only gradually submit the various ideas we were raised to believe to intense critical scrutiny to see whether we have very good reasons for believing them. However, believing something simply based on the authority of tradition is a very weak position to be in, epistemologically speaking.  If someone identifies as a skeptic (as you do), they should not be satisfied with holding a belief based on the authority of tradition without subjecting it to critical scrutiny. As you say, “we should make every effort to subject those [ethical] principles to critical examination.” In the case of ethical beliefs, this means asking the question, “why is it true that this is morally right and this is morally wrong?”, a question which, I would argue, ultimately requires a metaphysical answer.  Since you say that you “object most strongly to . . . the idea that ethics can only reasonably be based on metaphysics,” this seems to be a real point of disagreement between the two of us.  So, I will pause here to try to make a case for the necessary connection between morality²I am aware that some people make a distinction between “ethics” and “morality”; on this account, “ethics” merely refers to codes of conduct that happen to be expected in certain social contexts, without any judgment made about whether something is actually good or evil, while “morality” refers to the question of what is actually objectively good and evil.  In case this has been a point of miscommunication between us, perhaps I should clarify that I use the terms “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably as synonyms, both referring to the question of what is actually good and evil. As for codes of conduct that are expected in certain social contexts, I would probably just call these “rules” or “customs.” To me, it is obvious that sometimes the ethical thing to do is to break human rules and customs. and metaphysics.

Morality and Metaphysics

You mention that both Socrates and Confucius “advocated a position of personal humility. . . and individual responsibility toward the public good,” and that Confucius, at least, advocated virtues such as compassion and service.  You follow them “in advocating adherence to a set of ethical principles that work well to create personal and social harmony.” In your conclusion, you say that “we would want to temper our skepticism with a healthy sense of responsibility toward the rest of the world.”  I will point out that none of these ethical ideas – that we have a responsibility towards the common good/the world, that we should be compassionate, that we should care about social harmony – are self-evident. Why is it true that I ought to be compassionate rather than cruel?  Why is it true that I should care about others rather than being selfish? Why is it true that I should care about social harmony and not just my own wellbeing? At some point, a skeptic must ask these questions.  

There is an important difference between descriptive and prescriptive truths.  Descriptive truths are things that we encounter as brute facts through our empirical investigation of the world; they exist, we observe them, and thus we know them.  Prescriptive truths, on the other hand, are not objects existing out there in the world that we can observe, nor can we arrive at them through empirical investigation alone.  Rather, prescriptive truths have to do with our goals or values. When we say, “You ought to do this,” what we really mean is, “You ought to do this if you want to achieve such and such an end.”  Empirical investigation of the physical world can tell us what course of action will achieve a desired end, but it cannot in any way tell us what end(s) we ought to desire.  For example, “you should give food to that starving beggar, if you want them to stay alive.”  But what if someone is a cruel person and wants to see that starving beggar suffer and die? Then they will not agree that they should give them food.  Thus, our acceptance of any prescriptive claim (“you ought to do this”) is dependent upon whether our goals or values line up with the end that that course of action will bring about.  

Now, morality by definition is about what people are supposed to do (or the kind of people they are supposed to be), regardless of whether they want to or not.  Otherwise, it is meaningless to speak of morality. The statement, “you should give food to that starving beggar if you care about their wellbeing,” is not really a moral statement.  An example of a truly moral statement would be, “you ought to care about that starving beggar’s wellbeing.”  So what goals ought we to desire? What kind of people ought we to be?  Empirical investigation can in no way provide answers to these questions.  It can allow us to determine what course of action will allow us to achieve our goals, and it can allow us to describe the goals that people do have, but it cannot tell us anything about what goals we actually ought to have.  In order to say that we actually ought to have certain goals, ought to live a certain way, ought to be certain kinds of people, there needs to be a reference to some kind of transcendent reality that can provide an objective standard by which our actions and character can be judged as being actually good or evil.  In other words, morality must be based in metaphysics.  

Some people try to provide a secular account of morality by grounding it in human biology or human society.  However, these attempts fail. Human beings may be biologically wired for altruism, cooperation, and compassion, but they are also biologically wired for selfishness and cruelty; the fact that we have certain biological instincts does not tell us what desires and goals we in fact ought to have.  If everyone in a society acts justly and selflessly, everyone in that society will benefit, but it is perfectly possible for someone to benefit themselves even more by being selfish while still benefiting from the selflessness of others in their society; the mere fact that certain actions are beneficial to society does not tell us that we in fact ought to care about the good of the rest of society.  Thus, neither biology nor society provide a sound foundation for morality.  There is, in fact, no coherent secular account of objective morality.³I make a fuller argument for this point on my own blog here. 

You implicitly acknowledge that objective morality must be based on metaphysics when you say, “I understand that without a transcendent or metaphysical principle to point to, we are forced to admit our ethics are somewhat subjective. However, as discussed previously, all our knowledge about the world is limited and imperfect – in other words, somewhat subjective.”  Here, you seem to be equivocating between two senses of what it means to be “subjective.” Yes, all our knowledge of the world is “subjective” in the sense that we observe reality only from our particular viewpoint and our understanding of that reality is imperfect. But the reality that we observe is something that exists objectively and independent of our perception of it.  Now, it is quite another matter when someone makes the subjective claim “This is good” or “This is bad,” when all they really mean is, “This makes me feel good/I want this,” or “This makes me feel bad/I don’t want this.” In this case, there is no objective reality that is being observed subjectively; instead, it is merely an expression of subjective feelings and desires all the way down.  

A subjective morality is, ultimately, meaningless.  If “morality” is nothing but a reference to what is beneficial for society, then there is no way to tell a selfish person who does not care about the rest of society that they in fact ought to care about others.  If “morality” is nothing but a reference to what is kind and compassionate, then there is no way to tell a cruel person that they in fact ought to be kind and compassionate. In order for morality to have any real meaning, we need to be able to answer the question, “Why is it objectively true that we ought not to be selfish and cruel?”, and answering this question, ultimately, requires a metaphysical answer.  Socrates may not have provided a metaphysical explanation for why his moral beliefs were true, but I would merely say that that is a flaw in Socrates’s philosophy. Socrates’s student Plato, and Plato’s student Aristotle, on the other hand, both provided metaphysical explanations for their moral beliefs with their theories of the Forms,⁴Whether there is good reason for accepting their metaphysical theories of the Forms is another question. and their philosophies have been much more influential than Socrates’s throughout history.  

Moral Beliefs and Epistemology

So, I strongly disagree with the idea that moral truth can exist without a metaphysical basis.  However, I will concede that it is possible to hold to moral beliefs without having a clear metaphysical explanation for why those beliefs are true.  People can have beliefs about certain actions being good or bad without necessarily having an explanation for why this is the case.  

Let’s say a child is raised to wash his hands before eating, and the only explanation his parents give him is, “It’s good for you.”  He could go through his whole life believing that this is good for him, with his faith in the authority of his parents being the only basis for that belief.  However, this would make his belief low on the scale of reasonableness. At some point, if he really wants to be reasonable, he should try to critically investigate whether there really is a good reason that washing his hands before eating is good for him, or whether it is merely a superstition that his parents have passed on to him.  In the same way, someone could hold to moral beliefs that they have absorbed from human tradition, and say, “I do not know what the metaphysical basis for these moral beliefs is, but I will just assume there is one.” But this would make his moral beliefs low on the scale of reasonableness. At some point, if he really wants to be reasonable, he should try to critically investigate what the metaphysical basis of these beliefs is (or whether these beliefs are merely superstitions).  In sum, it is epistemologically possible to have moral beliefs without having them grounded in metaphysical beliefs, but it is not ontologically possible for there to be moral truths without those truths being grounded in metaphysical reality. If one holds to moral beliefs without having a metaphysical explanation for why they are true, one must still acknowledge that these moral truths have some kind of metaphysical basis, even if one is not sure what that basis is. But in this case, one’s moral beliefs are somewhat arbitrary and/or parasitic upon other people’s metaphysically grounded moral beliefs.

I to some extent understand your (and Confucius’s) hesitation to engage in metaphysical speculation.  Many modern philosophers would say that we simply cannot do metaphysics.⁵More careful skeptical philosophers, recognizing that “You can’t do metaphysics” is itself a metaphysical claim, instead simply avoid doing metaphysics, while arguing that there is insufficient basis for the particular metaphysical claims that other philosophers make.  However, I think a good case can be made that engaging in metaphysics is inevitable. Many philosophers have argued that, if you claim that you do not engage in metaphysics, in fact you always operating with implicit metaphysical assumptions, and these assumptions will be bad because they are never subjected to critical examination; for this reason, we should just explicitly engage in metaphysics, even as we acknowledge the limitations of human reason and our own fallibility.  So, if we are going to hold to ethical beliefs, which must ultimately have some kind of metaphysical foundation, then I think the most reasonable thing to do is to advocate a metaphysical theory that can provide a foundation for our ethical beliefs. But I can understand that if you are unconvinced that there is sufficient evidence that a particular metaphysical theory is true, and if there might be multiple metaphysical ideas that could potentially ground your ethical beliefs, you would be hesitant to do so.

Conclusion

So, have you convinced me that I should be more skeptical?  No. You have convinced me that you are perhaps not as skeptical as I previously thought, though I still think there are significant differences between our epistemological attitudes.  It may be that we will never quite agree on the issue of epistemology, although, as I have said, I do not think that we are all that far apart on this issue. And it is still perfectly possible for two people to fruitfully discuss and debate an issue without holding to the same epistemological views.  I do not think our epistemological differences are the main reason for our disagreements about Christianity; I think these stem more from our differing areas of knowledge and differing analyses of the evidence. Our discussion about epistemology over the last few posts has been important and in some ways enlightening, but I think it might be more fruitful at this point to turn back to our discussion of some of the issues, historical and otherwise, that are more directly relevant to the particular question we are discussing in this series: Christianity.  Of course, I expect you will need to respond to some of the points I have made in this post, so I will leave it to you what issues you wish to address in your next response.

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