Sunday, December 20, 2015

Moral Law Part II.2: Justification and Personal Immortality

Continuing with Gangadeanian ethics/meta-ethics. We'll pick up where we left off. We are looking at Gangadean's arguments for what is necessary for ethics as an intelligible field of study. He made the claim that "There are certain metaphysical, personal, and epistemological conditions which are necessary in order to make rational justification for ethics possible" (118).  And we looked at his first purported necessary condition (the metaphysical). Here's a brief-ish recap. If you feel like you got the gist of the last post, then you can skip the next 2 paragraphs.

Last time we discussed how Gangadean has failed to prove that the distinction between good and evil, which, as he sees it is necessary for ethics, requires that only some (spirit) is eternal. In other words, he claims that the God of theism must exist in order for rational justification of ethical views (views on right action and the Good) to be possible. But he fails to prove this. There's no deductively sound argument which has this very claim as its conclusion. In large part, his failure is due to the fact that he simply ignores the non-reductive materialists that also take it that good and evil or right and wrong are intelligible despite not being able to give a purely physicalist or naturalist account of them. But as I argued, showing that such a materialist can't explain how it is that properties like good and bad arise from physical stuff, doesn't prove that such a view is incoherent. At best it suggests that there is more work to do, or that there is some cost to the theory or that there are mysteries beyond our current capacities to account for which is entirely compatible with the naturalist picture of things.

In fact, this reminds me of a common objection against substance dualism (which is a view Gangadean adheres to). Substance dualists believe that there is a non-physical soul which is essentially the substance that underlies mentality (i.e., mental properties). This soul is thought to interact with the body/brain as it concerns human persons. After all it's commonly accepted that our psychological states influence our physical states (and vice-a-versa). Moreover many substance dualists (but not all) maintain that there are disembodied souls (as in the case of spirits, demons, angels, divine beings). But sometimes their critics argue that there is no ready explanation of how it is that nonphysical stuff (the soul) can interact with physical stuff. This is because physical stuff seems to interact on the basis of physical contact, as when a cue ball hits a billard ball causing the latter to roll. Presumably non-physical stuff can't interact in this very same way (being non physical) and so it's a bit of a mystery just how the soul can cause anything in the brain/body, or more generally, in the world. But this is not to prove deductively that substance dualism is false. Just because it can't explain a fundamental issue about mind and body interaction, doesn't mean it's a false view. One simply doesn't follow from the other. It may at best suggest a weakness in the view, but that's not disproving the view. Similarly, just because a nonreductive materialist can't explain how it is that apparently non-physical properties can emerge out of physical stuff, doesn't prove their position wrong. That's the main philosophical payoff of the last post.

Gangadean's second necessary condition for the possibility of rationally justifying an ethical position is personal immortality of the soul. He writes

"If there were not personal immortality, if death were the end of personal existence and if I and everyone else could cease to exist at any moment then I could not rationally justify to myself one course of actions over another" (118).

Unfortunately, there's little else said about this. And I'm rather surprised. We're dealing with a substantive claim that many philosophers will disagree with as will the skeptic. So it's hard to believe that Gangadean offers essentially nothing to justify the claim. He just sort of states these really contentious claims as platitudes. But he hasn't actually proven that rational justification of morally relevant actions would be pointless or impossible if there were not personal immortality. He's just stated it. So once again, Gangadean has failed his own standards for what it takes to know something. So here's his argument, in effect.

(1) If there is no personal immortality, then there is no rationally justifying one course of action over another.
(2) But rational justification of actions is possible.
(3) Therefore, it's not the case that there is no personal immortality (i.e, there is personal immortality).

It's valid, but not sound. It's valid because it's an instance of modus tollens.  But logical validity is cheap. All it takes for an argument to be valid is the following: if the premises were true, then the conclusion would follow. For instance every circular argument is deductively valid because there's no way for the premises to be true while at the same time the conclusion is false. What matters is whether the premises are actually true. And the problem is the first premise (1) is far from it. At least he hasn't convinced anybody that it is so just by merely stating it. Gangadean seems to take it for granted, but that's sloppy. It's a common worry I have about Gangadean's work---that he oversimplies things where it suits his aims. So this pseudo-argument is a far cry from proving anything. A fortiori, he has failed to prove that immortality is required for the possibility of rational justification in ethics and hence has failed to prove that personal immortality is necessary.

p.s. Just to clear about the upshot here, which is important for my readers to keep in mind: I'm not saying that personal identity is therefore not required for ethics (I'm not arguing that Gangadean's thesis is demonstrably wrong). I, for one, find it intuitively plausible that there's a real sense in which worrying about how to live is a little emptier (in some sense that's really hard to get precise about) without immortality. But that's distinct from Gangadean's position. It's logically weaker. What I am pointing out is that Gangadean hasn't proven his claim to be true. And since he calls belief without proof, fideism, he's being a fideist about this unless of course, he can provide a sound (not merely valid) argument for this claim. In other words, once again I'm pointing out that while Gangadean professes to be somehow more rigorous than other philosophers and Christians, this is not evident in his published work.

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