The Moral Law part 1

I'm starting to look through Gangadean's section on Ethics, (part III of Philosophical Foundation). From what I can gather Gangadean thinks that we can derive the moral law (a certain construal of the 10 commandments) from reason alone. I think this is an incredible claim. In fact, I'll argue that Gangadean fails to show that the moral law is clear to reason. Instead he rests his case on raw intuitions and commonsense reasoning under the guise of "reason".

Recall that for Gangadean a thing is clear = one can know that thing with absolute certainty. Meaning one can rule out even the remotest of remote possibilities that one is wrong about what one purports to know. So for you to know that you have hands, you have to be able to show how it's logically impossible for you to be a handless brain in a vat (and any number of skeptical hypotheses e.g., that your hands have been replaced with incredibly convincing fake hands). If you can't do the latter, then you don't know that you have hands. So for Gangadean to claim that the moral law (the 10 commandments) are knowable/clear to reason means that he ought to be able to rule out even the most far-fetched possibility that he's wrong (i.e., he needs to prove that it's logically impossible that the 10 commandments are not morally binding norms). On his own standard of knowledge, he's got to provide airtight, deductively sound arguments showing that everyone ought to follow these laws, which amounts to being able to derive them (qua moral laws) purely via deduction.

To begin, Gangadean considers the first moral law (starting on pg 121). I'm not entirely sure what he's getting at. He says that the first moral law is about "the moral absolute" (God). He also writes, "the first moral law can be stated as follows: God, the Creator of human nature, is the determiner of good and evil for man" (125).  I don't get this because it doesn't sound like a moral law to me. But in this same section he contrasts theism with non-theism. So I guess that the first moral law really is about knowing that God is qua determiner of good and evil. I'm not entirely sure, but that's the best I can do. Hopefully, he thinks that the moral law is clearer to reason than he is at spelling it out.

Now since I've got nothing better to go on, I'm again going to assume that to obey the first moral law (as Gangadean sees it) amounts to knowing that God is the determiner of good and evil. This presupposes of course that one knows that God exists and also something about the nature of good and evil. In other words, the first moral law is primarily an epistemological law or norm. It's most essentially about what one ought to believe (given that knowledge entails belief). At this point, the best way to think about all of this is that Gangadean is telling us a story about what he thinks are the moral norms by which we are all obliged to live. Importantly, the reader must be armed with the fact that just because he says things are a certain way doesn't mean that they are. So now we need to look at his arguments. How can he know with absolute certainty that all humans ought to know that God exists and that he is the determiner of good and evil?

Let's look at his arguments. It would have been really nice if he gave us an explicit argument with premises and the following conclusion: "for any person s, s ought to know that God exists and that he is the determiner of good and evil." That would have made things much clearer to the reader. But we are without. So we'll have to do our best to figure out his argument from a series of discussions that he includes in this section.

For starters, Ganagdean provides a prelude to this section with a discussion about how the good must be clear to reason (pg. 117). He tells the reader that he will be proposing a definition of ethics and then providing an explanation for this proposal. This is interesting. Proposing a definition is essentially stipulating a definition or trying one out. Maybe Gangadean is finally hedging his claims! Unfortunately, the hedging soon disappears. But it's important to acknowledge just what it means to propose a definition rather than figuring out the right definition.  As I've discussed before, Gangadean just presents his account of knowledge and reason, as obviously the correct ones. For instance, he just flat out asserts that reason is the laws of thought. It never occurs to him that he needs to defend these proposals. It never occurs to him that he might be wrong, that reason is not identifiable with the laws of thought or even that the laws of thought are not as he thinks them to be. But curiously, here he's actually showing you his cards. He seems suddenly aware that he's merely suggesting or hypothesizing about the nature of ethics (or what we mean by the word 'ethics') and then he'll try and support why we should agree with him on his definition. Sadly, the self awareness is short-lived. He doesn't ever make good on this. It's as if by the end of the section he's forgotten about the tentative nature of his proposal and he seems to think that he has proven the thing that follows from this definition (even though the definition actually remains up for debate).

If you suppose something to be the case in order to derive some conclusion, your conclusion will be hypothetical. Undergraduates that have taken first-order logic will know this. It's called a conditional proof. You assume something and then show where it leads (via valid rules of inference). Importantly, all you get to conclude form such an argument is a conditional statement---what is true provided that the starting premise is true. So if Gangadean is engaging in something like a conditional proof (where he's assuming a definition and seeing where it leads), his conclusion should be nothing more than a hypothetical one.

Alternatively, he might be arguing abductively. That is, he might be arguing that his definition of ethics does the best job at explaining some set of data. But this won't work for his purposes either. Abductive reasoning is a form of induction. It's never gets one to certainty like deduction is supposed to. This is because in an inference to the best explanation you have to start with certain phenomena that is agreed upon as in want of explanation. Then the theoretician attempts to come up with what she thinks is the best explanation of the data, fully acknowledging that it isn't the only explanation possible. And things get really murky here. For example, it isn't clear what makes an explanation the best one. The natural question that arises is best in what sense? At this point philosophers and scientists consider things like simplicity, explanatory scope, and the like. But as Hume famously suggested, it isn't clear why we should think the world cares about simplicity or explanatory scope, even if we do as theorizers. In other words, it's a bit of a mystery why we should think that the fact that a proposal is simple or explains a lot of phenomena indicates that the proposal is true.  To sum up: whether Gangadean is proposing his definition for purposes of a conditional proof or as a means to abductive reasoning, neither gets him to knowledge (according to his own standards).

So what is Gangadean's proposal? He writes,

"Ethics is an area of philosophy concerned with giving a rational justification for an answer to the question, 'what is the good?'" (117).

He then goes on to talk about how ethics assumes choice and that choice assumes value. Moreover he states that a hierarchy of values assumes that something is of the highest value (note he is presupposing that there are such things as a hierarchy of values here).

Notice these seem to be "observations" that Gangadean is making. But I wonder, on Gangadean's own quirky standards for knowledge, whether he would count as knowing them all to be true. It doesn't seem so. How can one come to know with certainty that for instance, there are such things as a hierarchy of values? I mean, maybe he's making the more modest claim that when you consider human psychology, we act as if there are such things as a hierarchy of values. For instance, we tend to desire world peace more than we want dessert (expressly at least). Now I don't think Gangadean could ever be certain of even this claim based on his standards---this is because one derives such a psychological observations via fallible perceptual faculties and then uses these observations to make generalizations that are a far reach from deductive inferences. So I don't know how he could possibly count as knowing that all people believe that values are hierarchically ordered, in fact, given what he demands for knowledge, he can't even know that people tend to.

More importantly though, even if he could know psychological facts as these, it doesn't get him to where he wants to go. What he really needs for his project is not some facts about how people behave or what they think about the nature of values. Gangadean needs to show that it is in the very nature of values that they be ordered hierarchically. Not that we merely think that they are. And it seems that the claim he wants to derive is that whether or not people tend to see things this way (or behave as if they do), they ought to because it's a fact of reality that we should in some suitable sense track. This is why I think he falters here. He just doesn't have sufficient reason to believe this (or at least he hasn't presented us with any). My guess is that he's making the same mistake that I have often accused him of making before. He seems to think that he's got infallible a priori access to such facts. The idea being he thinks he can just think, from his armchair, about the very nature of values and can derive that values have this property of being hierarchically arranged. But this is incredibly contentious. I mean, how does he know that he isn't just uncovering his own idiosyncratic views on the matter? And where is his argument? If he's actually got some airtight deductive argument which shows that there is in fact a hierarchy of values, why doesn't he provides us with it?

And this worry extends quite easily to all of this claims of the "X assumes Y" form. For instance, how on earth does he know with certainty that ethics assumes choice. Or that choice assumes values? Again if he's just making psychological discoveries, then all he has are descriptive facts about how people tend to behave or what they think. Even if we act as if choice assumes values. It doesn't follow form that that choice in fact, assumes values. None of what he has said gets him to the nature of choice, or ethics, or value since the fact that we act as if something is the case doesn't entail that it is the case. So then where are the arguments that prove that ethics assumes choice. Or that choice assumes values?

Gangadean is merely helping himself to claims/premises which according to his own standard of knowledge, are not known by him--viz., he is ignorant about them. The same goes for the following claim: "when we choose something, we choose it either as a means to something else or for its own sake" and "it is the good that is ultimately sought through choice" (117). How can Gangadean prove these things? How can he know them?

My take is that Gangadean is pumping the reader's intuitions, once again. Gangadean finds each of these claims intuitive, or in line with his own commonsense (even though he wouldn't use those labels on pain of hypocrisy). He is counting on the reader to share these same intuitions, without realizing that they are intuitions. You might even find yourself feeling as if they most certainly have to be true--like, "duh, they just seem like platitudes." But these are substantive claims that some might disagree with and so Gangadean should (according to his own standards) provide rational justifications for them (i.e., rock-solid, sound-deductive proofs). I'm curious why Gangadean often blames other philosophers and Christians for failing to answer skeptical worries and yet ignores them himself when it suits his own interests.

Notice after having said all of this, what I haven't been able to discuss, yet, is whether Gangadean has shown that his conception of the first moral is correct. Recall, that the first moral law requires that one know that God is the determiner of good and evil. What I have done is to show that Gangadean in setting up his argument/arguments to this end, has failed to abstain from commonsense and intuition pumping. Since this is getting quite long I've decided to break this post up into parts. So we'll continue the inquiry next time.