Giving a Human Face to the Marriage Equality Issue

In the video behow, my cousins (Phil is my first cousin) stand up for marriage equality and speak out against the proposed Minnesota State Constitutional Amendment which would exclude same-sex couples from equal access to civil marriage rights--in effecting writing legal discrimination into the constitution of that state (as has already been done here in Oklahoma and elsewhere). Take a moment to watch, and feel free to share.

Kantian Ethics, Part 2: The First Formulation of the Categorical Imperative

In my last post I started to consider Kant's moral philosophy, focusing on Kant's contention--in opposition to Hume--that reason can generate (at least one) "imperative" that is categorically action-guiding. That is, it tells you to act in a certain way regardless of what you happen to subjectively value or desire.

Hume thought reason was a slave to the passions. It can tell you how to achieve a certain aim, producing a principle of the form, "In order to achieve O, do A." But unless you desire or value O, such a principle (what Kant calls a "hypothetical imperative") has no force for you. Kant did not deny that reason can and does operate as a slave to the passions in this way. What he denied was that this was the only thing it could do in the domain of action. Contrary to Hume, Kant thought reason not only can but does impose a requirement on all rational beings that applies regardless of their contingent "inclinations"--a requirement that he called "the Categorical Imperative."

He thought this Categorical Imperative could be formulated in different ways. The first "formulation" runs as follows:

Act only according to that maxim which you can at the same time (consistently) will to be a universal law (of nature).

In the present post, I want to consider what this principle is saying and why Kant thinks that reason requires us to be obedient to it. In the case of the first formulation (or what I'll refer to for short as the 1st CI), these two tasks are most easily pursued together. That is, one really comes to understand what the principle is saying by thinking about what reason (as Kant understood it) demands.

Now let me pause here to say that Kant is a difficult thinker, and not everyone interprets him in precisely the same way. What I am about to provide is my understanding of the 1st CI. It's not a wildly novel or original understanding--I dare say it falls very much into the mainstream of Kant interpretation. But it is, nevertheless, my understanding and my way of formulating this understanding. Other philosophers may disagree with some of the details, or may prefer a different way of explicating things.

In terms of making sense of what Kant is saying in the 1st CI, it sometimes helps to begin with a rough picture before getting more focused--and there is no better place to start than with a little anecdote involving philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser. According to the story, Morgenbesser was leaving the New York subway, an unlit pipe in his mouth, when a police officer informed him there was no smoking on the subway. Morgenbesser pointed out he hadn't yet lit the pipe and was leaving the subway station. After a bit of back-and-forth, the officer said, "If I let you do it, I'd have to let everyone do it"--to which Morgenbesser replied with something along the following lines: "Who do you think you are? Kant?"

He was promptly arrested.

I'm assured he was eventually able to convince the authorities that he was likening the officer to the great 18th Century German enlightenment philosopher, not resorting to a vulgar insult. But the likeness here is apt. The officer was implicitly invoking something like the 1st CI, which asks us to consider the following question: "What if everyone did that?" Or, perhaps better: "What if everyone did that as a rule?"

In very loose but pedagogically helpful terms, the 1st CI is telling us that it is only legitimate for us to act in a certain way if everyone acting in that way as a rule is something we could consistently will. In other words, what we're doing has to be universalizable. But while pedagogically helpful for the sake of getting us to see what the 1st CI calls for, this way of describing the principle isn't precise enough for us to be able to clearly see why Kant thought that reason, by itself, demands obedience to it.

For that purpose, we should probably focus in on the notion of a maxim. What Kant believes must be universalizable is not our action but the maxim of the action. By a “maxim,” Kant means a subjective principle of action.

Here is the first place at which Kant's understanding of what it means to be rational is expressed within the 1st CI. Kant thought that reason is, by its nature, an abstractive faculty: it abstracts from the particular level to the general or universal level. It uncovers patterns, regularities, laws. In the domain of action, this means that to be rational is to behave in a rule-governed way, to act in accord with a rule.

Now, of course, we’re not always intending to follow a rule when we do something. But even then, we can ask ourselves, “What rule would I be following in this case were I conforming my action to a rule?” The answer to that question is the maxim of the act, the principle that your act falls under The maxim of your act is the principle you’d be following were you deliberately seeking to behave in a rule-governed way.

Of course, there are difficulties here, because there are numerous ways to generalize, various degrees of generality, and hence a number of rules that any particular action might conform to. Put more simply, the very same act in the very same circumstances might be called for by a number of different rules. So which one is your maxim?

In fact, much of the difficulty in interpreting Kant turns on this very issue. One neo-Kantian, R.M. Hare, argued that the proper "maxim" for your action is arrived at by removing from the description of your act all particular or individual references while preserving maximal specificity--such that the maxim says, in effect, "Do actions like this (specified in exhaustive detail) under conditions like these (specified exhaustively)." But few think that this is what Kant had in mind, and most neo-Kantians don't follow Hare's lead here.

Despite the importance of this controversy, I won't pursue it here. My aim here is to understand why Kant thought reason required obedience to the 1st CI; and I think we can begin to get a handle on that even if many important problems remain to be solved.

In any event, Kant thought that being rational in one's actions required operating in a rule-governed way, which means following a maxim. But the demands of rationality do not end there, because Kant didn’t think any old maxim is necessarily going to be rational. While operating in a rule-governed way is a condition for rationality, it is not the only condition. One's rule of action has to be a rational rule. And there are certain conditions a rule has to meet in order to be a rational rule. The 1st CI is, in effect, an effort to articulate these conditions. To be rational, you need to act in accord with a rule that passes the test specified in the 1st CI: Can one preserve consistency in one's will if one wills that one's maxim be universalized?

In a nutshell, Kant is supposing that rationality requires consistency of will (to will inconsistent things is to be irrational) and consistency across cases (in the sense that one must treat like cases alike, and hence be governed by rules that are universal in the sense of calling for the same kind of thing in all relevantly similar conditions). A maxim that can't be applied consistently across relevantly similar cases without generating an inconsistency of will is thus doomed to irrationality. To preserve consistency of will (which reason requires), you'll need to refrain from universalizing your maxim (but reason also requires that). To universalize your maxim (which reason requires), you'll need to land your will in a contradiction.

Hence, reason requires that you only act on maxims that you can universalize without generating an inconsistency in your will. This, then, is a categorical imperative of reason, one that reason generates all by itself (apart from the passions), and that is demanded by reason regardless of one's inclinations. If your maxim doesn't meet the test of the 1st CI, then reason precludes acting on it no matter how much you might want to.

But so far this is all expressed in very abstract terms--and as such, certain crucial questions are left unanswered. For example, what, exactly, is a contradiction in one's will? And how could universalizing one's maxim lead to such a contradiction? To answer these questions, it is probably most helpful to look at some concrete cases. And I can think of no better case to start with than one Kant himself makes use of himself.

In fact, Kant offered four examples of how the Categorical Imperative works in practice, but one of them is offered twice (in different sections of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals), apparently because he thought it was particularly helpful. This is the example of making a false promise. He asks us to imagine someone who desperately needs to borrow money, knows he will be unable to repay the lender, but also knows that no one will lend him the money he needs unless he makes a promise to repay within a certain time frame (a promise which, given his inability to repay, can only be a false one).

Can the making of such a false promise be morally permissible? Kant's answer, based on the 1st CI, is no. Here's how he explains it:

...the maxim of his action would be expressed thus: When I think myself in want of money, I will borrow money and promise to repay it, although I know that I never can do so. Now this principle of self-love or of one's own advantage may perhaps be consistent with my whole future welfare; but the question now is, Is it right? I change then the suggestion of self-love into a universal law, and state the question thus: How would it be if my maxim were a universal law? Then I see at once that it could never hold as a universal law of nature, but would necessarily contradict itself. For supposing it to be a universal law that everyone when he thinks himself in a difficulty should be able to promise whatever he pleases, with the purpose of not keeping his promise, the promise itself would become impossible, as well as the end that one might have in view in it, since no one would consider that anything was promised him, but would ridicule all such statements as vain pretenses.

Kant really makes two points here with respect to the attempt to universalize the "false promise maxim." First, were it universalized the institution of promising would collapse. If everyone made false promises as a matter of universal law, no one would be able to make a false promise because no one would be able to make a promise.

One way to understand this is to think of what a promise is. In terms of its grammar, a promise is a "performative"--one performs a certain kind of act by saying that one does the act. But as with other performatives, there is a social context of mutual understandings which makes it possible to perform the act in question by uttering certain words. A minister who says "I now pronounce you husband and wife" under the proper conditions is able by those words to create a social relationship because of a complex set of social agreements that have been put into place. Take away those social agreements, and the words become empty. The minister is no longer able to marry anyone by saying those words. Likewise, the practice of promising is a social institution that exists only on the condition that certain mutual understandings are in place--and those mutual understandings would not be in place in conditions C were the making of false promises under conditions C a universal law. To will that everyone live by the maxim is impossible, because if everyone lived by the maxim no one could.

And so there is a practical contradiction bound up with willing the maxim to be a universal law: You simultaneously will (a) that everyone act in a certain way and (b) that it be impossible for them to act in that way. This, for Kant, is paradigmatically irrational. But refusing to treat like cases alike--refusing to universalize your maxim--is also paradigmatically irrational. Hence, there is no way to be rational while acting on this maxim. Reason therefore rules it out. There is a categorical prohibition on making false promises, whether the making of such promises is subjectively appealing to you or not.

But few cases are quite as neat as this, where it would be impossible for anyone to act on a maxim were everyone to act on it (arguably, a prohibition on stealing could be justified in these terms since stealing by definition invokes the notion of private property, which would not exist under a universal maxim of theft). But Kant also points out a second way in which the false promise maxim generates a practical contradiction when universalized. It is not just the making of the promise that becomes impossible, but also "the end that one might have in view in it." In making a false promise in this case, one is attempting to achieve thereby a certain objective--getting the loan. But were it a universal law that people make false promises in such cases, no one would loan money on the strength of a promise of repayment. So the end or goal for which one wills the maxim in one's own case is an end or goal that could not be realized if everyone acted on that maxim.

When you will the maxim in your own case, it is for the sake of achieving an end that would be rendered impossible for you to achieve were you also to will that the maxim of your action be a universal law. To will that your maxim be universalized is therefore to will a certain action for the sake of a certain objective, and to at the same time will that conditions prevail such that it be impossible for you to achieve your objective through this course of action. But to will the achievement of O via A, and at the same time to will that it be impossible to achieve O via A, is paradigmatically irrational. It's to will contradictory things. So, in order to be rational you must universalize your maxim--but universalizing this maxim involves a practical contradiction given the end for which you are willing the maxim in your own case. So either you universalize and land yourself in a contradiction, or you avoid contradiction by refusing to universalize (by, in effect, refuse to behave in the law-like, treat-like-cases-alike way that is definitive of rationality for Kant).

This second kind of practical contradiction does not just apply to false promises and a narrow range of similar practices. It clearly applies to lying in general (which only works in a context of honesty), and it also seems to be the same basic kind of contradiction that Kant thinks arises with respect to what we might call the egoist maxim--which is a second of the four examples Kant brings up to illuminate the 1st CI.

The egoist maxim is, in a nutshell, this: Look out exclusively for your own happiness and let others look our for their own. Kant thinks that the world might continue to chug along if this maxim "should have the universal validity of a law of nature," but he doesn't think anyone could consistently will this maxim. On the contrary, "a will which resolved this would contradict itself, inasmuch as many cases might occur in which one would have need of the love and sympathy of others, and in which , by such a law of nature, sprung from his own will, he would deprive himself of all hope of the aid he desires." Put simply, if you will this maxim in your own case it is for the sake of your own happiness--but your happiness is better served in a world where following your maxim is not a universal law. This is not quite as strong a contradiction as you get when it would be impossible to achieve your end were everyone to follow your example. He's not saying that happiness is always impossible to achieve in a world where everyone just looks out for themselves--just that it's much harder to achieve, and that chances are (given the world in which we live) you'll encounter circumstances in which your happiness will depend on the good will of others.

Kant uses a pair of other examples to highlight how the 1st CI works and why he believes reason demands obedience to it--both of which are, in my experience, more controversial to dominant modern sensibilities. The first considers the suicidal maxim: take your own life when the future is likely to hold more misery than joy. The second considers what I'll call the lazy wastrel maxim: let your talents go undeveloped in favor of indulging in empty pleasures. In both cases, there is a bit more emphasis of the language of "nature"--testing whether the maxim could be willed as a law of nature, or as something "implanted in us" as a "natural instinct."

With respect to the suicidal maxim, Kant thinks that a world in which this maxim operates as a natural law "could not exist as a system of nature," because it would involve "the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life" being directed in a law-like way towards the destruction of life. According to Kant, the life-improvement instinct couldn't be the life-improvement instinct if it consistently dictated self-destruction under certain conditions.

Why not, we might ask? Can't an instinct be a qualified instinct and still be a coherent and consistent one?

With respect to the lazy wastrel maxim, Kant is clear "that a system of nature could indeed subsist with a such a universal law." So he is explicitly contrasting it with the suicidal maxim. It is to the suicidal maxim, if you will, what the egoist maxim is to the lying promise maxim. What Kant argues is that while a system of nature could exist in which everyone neglects the cultivation of their talents and abilities, no rational being could will that this be a driving natural instinct that rules human behavior. Why? Because "as a rational being, he necessarily wills that his faculties be developed, since they serve him, and have been given him, for all sorts of possible purposes." At least it sounds very much as if Kant is saying that reason necessarily wills certain ends--ends which would not be served if the lazy wastrel maxim were universalized. But Kant's defense of this idea is a single sketchy sentence that has left more than one reader scratching their heads.

Some argue that these two examples implicitly invoke elements of the natural law tradition in which Kant was steeped. Some contemporary followers of Kant seem to think that, for this reason, they can simply ignore these examples, setting them aside (as somehow infected with the theoretical baggage of Kant's era) in favor of the examples that more cleanly focus on notions of rational consistency.

But this strikes me as a mistake for several reasons. First of all, Kant chose his examples quite carefully in order to elucidate different ways in which a maxim can fail the test of the 1st CI, and so there may be important lessons to be learned about the scope of the CI that emerges when we investigate these examples--lessons that may be important even if we aren't convinced by the specific examples.

Second, Kant was in the habit of attempting to reframe inherited ideas within the context of his own philosophical system--in effect exploring the possibility that traditional notions might embody an implicit wisdom that Kant's philosophical investigations could reveal. As such, it may be that Kant is trying to "vindicate" (from the standpoint of his own system of thinking) some modified version of natural law theory--showing, in effect, that traditional moral ideas can be justified by appeal to the demands of practical rationality. If so, it is worth exploring the extent to which he succeeds.

Third, Kant may have deliberately embraced important elements of the natural law tradition that preceded him because he recognized something profound and important in them that he wanted to preserve within his own moral philosophy. Perhaps those of his examples that seem to be more tied to this older tradition are so puzzling because he had not yet succeeded in integrating the insights from this older tradition into his account of how morality can be grounded in the demands of reason. But investigating Kant's (presumed) failure here may prove  fruitful--perhaps even as a pathway to revising Kant's theory in beneficial ways.

That said, this post has gotten plenty long already--and there is enough room for critical discussion in relation to the examples that, in my experience, are more compelling to modern sensibilities.

In my next main post in this series, I want to turn to the Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative--the so-called "formula of humanity" which holds that we must always treat humanity as an end and never as a means only. Here we encounter a fundamental principle which is more substantive in what it requires than is the 1st CI (which, like the Golden Rule to which it has been likened, is a more formal principle in the sense of offering a formula for determining whether something is permitted as opposed to laying down specific substantive requirements). The 2nd CI (as I will call it) is also a principle which establishes an end for the sake of which we are to act--and end which, according to Kant, is given to us by reason.

Kantian Ethics, Part 1: Kant vs. Hume

I've been thinking for awhile now that it would be helpful, for the sake of the discussions about ethics on this blog, to devote some time to explicating Kant's thinking about the nature and foundations of morality, as well as some of the neo-Kantian approaches that have been pursued since. I begin this endeavor in the current post, by thinking about the context against which Kant developed his moral theory. Specifically, I want to locate Kant's moral theory in relation to the thinking of his predecessor whom Kant credited with "waking" him from his "dogmatic slumber"--the empiricist philosopher David Hume.

One of the most significant features of Kant’s moral philosophy is its status as a response to Hume’s dictum, “Reason is a slave to the passions.” Hume’s idea here--an important challenge to the dominant thinking about morality that preceded him--has since seeped deeply into the modern naturalist worldview. The basic notion is this: human reason cannot tell us how we ought to behave on its own. Rather, it can only tell us how to achieve certain aims, given that we want to achieve those aims.

In other words, my appetites and desires—influenced by inheritance and upbringing—lead me to value certain ends or goals; and then my reason can tell me how to achieve those ends or goals. With the right information and the proper degree of impartiality, I can reason out the most efficient pathway to get what I want. But absent some goal given to me by my “passions,” reason is not action-guiding at all.

In Kant’s language, Hume thinks that reason is only capable of generating “hypothetical imperatives”: injunctions on action of the form, “If you want X, then do Y.” But such imperatives are not action-guiding by themselves. Tell me that to avoid tooth decay I should brush my teeth, and I’ll brush my teeth—if I want to avoid tooth decay. But suppose, for some reason, I want my teeth to rot out of my mouth (perhaps I hate myself and have heard that dental health and hygiene is directly correlated with longevity). In that case, the “hypothetical” or conditional imperative doesn’t apply to me.

So, Hume thought that reason could only generate hypothetical imperatives. It could not, on Hume’s view, generate “categorical imperatives,” which have the form “Do Y (regardless of your desires).” Put another way, Hume thought that reason could not establish unconditional laws for behavior, rules for behavior that it is rational for us to act on regardless of our contingent appetites or desires. Reason can tell us that action A is the most efficient way to get outcome O, but it cannot tell us that we ought to pursue O, let alone that we ought unconditionally ought to pursue some action A regardless of its outcome. All rational reflection on action is, for Hume, means-ends thinking: if you seek a given outcome O, action A is the way to get there.

For Hume, this meant that if any reason-generated principles for behavior applied universally to all people, it would be because certain desires were universal. Perhaps all people desire happiness. If so, then a dictum of the form, “If you want to be happy, do Y” would be universal in its scope. It would apply to all people, but only because all people just happen to subjectively value their own happiness.

It was a short step from Hume’s dictum to 20th Century variants of ethical subjectivism—that is, to views of ethics which hold that moral norms apply to us only if they’re in line with our subjective values. While a certain uniformity of subjective values might be explained in terms of species-wide facts of human biology, and more localized uniformity might be achieved through socialization or cultural conditioning, there are no values that it would be intrinsically irrational to have (or not to have). And there are no moral prohibitions or requirements that apply regardless of people’s subjective values.

Kant thought all of this was nonsense. He was convinced, in contrast with Hume, that reason could place requirements on action that apply regardless of our subjective desires, and that reason could demand that we value certain things. Put more simply, Kant was convinced that there are some things that it is irrational for you to do even if doing it conflicts with none of your actual wants or desires. There is, according to Kant, at least one Categorical Imperative (upper case) that reason lays down. Obedience to this Categorical Imperative is an absolute condition for being rational in one’s practical life.

In fact, Kant thought there was indeed but one Categorical Imperative of reason—a very general principle that has a wide range of implications. In other words, he thought reason gives to us a fundamental principle of morality, from which all our specific moral duties derive. But he also thought that this fundamental principle could be formulated in different ways. Later commentators have often puzzled over these formulations, because they don’t seem to be different formulations of the same principle. Rather, they appear to be different principles. But that is an issue I probably won't take up in this series of posts.

In my next post, I will look at the first “formulation” of Kant’s “Categorical Imperative,” with an eye towards doing two things: first, explicating what, exactly, the principle is requiring of us; second, explaining why Kant thought that this principle was a demand of rationality, regardless of our desires.

Who's an Apologist?

Am I one? My first book, Is God a Delusion?, was called a work of Christian apologetics often enough—but I think the assumption that it was such a work lies behind many of the more uncharitable misreadings of it.


I certainly don’t think of myself as an apologist. Nor do I want that label for myself. Most of my work in Christian philosophical theology has involved adopting a critical stance towards such traditional Christian teachings as the just war tradition, the doctrine of hell, the doctrine of plenary verbal inspiration, and the categorical condemnation of homosexual intimacy.

But this critical stance has also been an internal one. That is, I have criticized Christian teachings from within. And when I first started reading the New Atheists, I found myself in the odd position of strongly disagreeing with their overall perspective towards theistic religion while, in fact, agreeing with many if not most of their most explicit criticisms. New Atheists like Richard Dawkins struck me as a bit like a tone-deaf person in the 1940’s who has never experienced the joys of opera but who is well schooled in human health issues—and who proceeds to scathingly denounces opera because the singers are on average too fat.

In my recent interview for the [ad hoc] Christianity podcast, the topic of apologetics came up, and I had the chance to try to formulate my thoughts on the topic. I suggested that apologists such as William Lane Craig operate like defense attorneys in a courtroom. Their goal is not to find the truth, but to vigorously defend their client. While such vigorous defense of a position can have a place in intellectual life—and while people such as Craig have much to say that is worth listening to—I would much rather be an explorer than a defense attorney.

That is, I have always seen myself as on an intellectual journey of discovery. This doesn’t mean I’m not prepared to vigorously defend a position (“This seems like a much more promising path if we want to find the lake, since it tracks the stream’s course, and there’s reason to think the stream is emptying into the lake”; “That strikes me as far too dangerous a road to travel; just look at the recent signs of rockslides, not to mention the bear prints!”). But it does mean that I don’t see myself as primary in the business of “defending the faith.” Living the faith, yes—but living it in the sense of living in it—in a rich landscape full of treasures as well as traps, wonderful vistas as well as bear caves.

This analogy is imperfect, since living the faith is, in another sense, a matter of seeing the same landscape that others live in through a distinctive set of glasses—and since what I want to explore is not merely the landscape, or the landscape as seen through this set of lenses, but the issue of “fit.” How well does this "prescription" help me to navigate on my journey? How well does it help me to see and appreciate the scenic overviews? What do others profess to see that I don’t, and what do I see that they don’t? How might these lenses be refined in the light of these insights? I don’t see how I can pursue these questions if I don’t put on the glasses. Nor, however, do I see how I can pursue these questions if all I care about is defending the glasses against all challenges to their adequacy.

But insofar as I am that kind of explorer, I do feel compelled to defend the validity of the kind of exploration I am doing when it is challenged. Do I then become an apologist?

I have a feeling that the glasses analogy is about to reach the end of its usefulness, so let me leave analogies behind for now and address explicitly what sparked this reflection. In response to my [ad hoc] Christianity interview, a regular commenter on this blog, Burk, posted here the following challenge:

I appreciated your consideration of William Lane Craig, for putting his cart before his horse. But then you also state your aim at the outset of your own polemical exercises, which is to show that religion can be intellectually respectable. Statements to this effect pepper your book and blog.

What if it isn't intellectually respectable? What if you are presuming what you seek to show, for reasons that are palpably emotional and inchoate? Sure, you may wish for intellectual respectibility, but have you gotten there? The whole idea of god is very much in question and remains to be shown in any "intellectual" sense. Thus the various projects of going beyond this towards "him" keeping "his" hand out to all sinners, saving them from "hell" and taking them to "heaven".. it is all risible- very much beneath intellectual respectibility.

Let me try to restate this challenge by first explicating what I take to be two characteristic features of apologists: first, they take the truth of a traditional body of doctrines as a given and then direct their intellectual resources to the task of defending that body of doctrine against challenges; second, their aim is to show not merely that their belief system is reasonable, but that—at least when it comes to its most central pillars—their system offers the most reasonable position, or perhaps the only reasonable one. Those who deny these pillars are therefore defective in their rationality. Put another way, the apologist is engaged in a kind of zero-sum contest of the sort one sees in sporting competitions and courtrooms, and is attempting to come out the winner.

Let me say a few things about these two features. The first seems to me a necessary condition for being an apologist: You have to be playing the intellectual game of defending your belief system against challenges—as opposed, for example, to critically examining those challenges to decide whether they have merit, and if so what changes in one’s belief system are called for. This feature may also, I think, be a sufficient condition for being an apologist—that is, even if the second feature doesn’t obtain, you might still be classified as an apologist. That said, the second feature is certainly very typical of apologists even if not strictly necessary. My own inclination is to treat it as characteristic but not necessary, and thus to distinguish between two kinds of apologists: the more common “adversarial apologist,” and what we might call the “friendly apologist.”

But even if we regard the second feature as necessary, it is clearly not sufficient. Every one of us views some positions we hold as not only reasonable, but as more reasonable than the alternatives. For example, I think the earth is roughly spherical, and I think any Flat-Earthers out there are being unreasonable in denying this. Am I therefore an apologist for the ball-shaped character of our planet? Not necessarily. First off, I might not feel inclined to defend my view about the earth's shape against Flat Earth challenges.

But even if I did defend my position, I wouldn't necessarily be an apologist for it. After all, I might consider the weight of the Flat Earth objections, decide after a fair and balanced reflection on them that that they are uncompelling, and then explain why. While I end up defending Round-Earthism, I'm not operating as a defense attorney for it, since I first considered the arguments against it fairly before deciding that they didn't work--and might have decided the other way.

But what if I roll my eyes dismissively, never taking the Flat-Earther argument seriously as I demolish it. Am I an apologist then? Not necessarily. Suppose (as I think is true) my commitment to the roundness of the Earth—and my belief about the selective irrationality of Flat-Earthers—is based on exposure to an enormous body of intellectually compelling evidence. There was a time, perhaps, when the Flat-Earth position was credible in the light of the available evidence. But as our body of evidence grew there were debates and discussions about the significance of that evidence. The Round-Earth theory grew in strength and plausibility, and the objections to it from the Flat-Earth camp proved themselves to be based on unsound thinking or incomplete knowledge.

And today, if the objections coming from the Flat-Earth camp are the same old ones that have already been thoroughly discredited, I'm not being an apologist even if I start out the debate convinced that the objection to my view is empty. My attitude is not “This objection *must* be vapid, since it conflicts with my belief; the task at hand is to figure out how and why it is vapid.” My attitude is, instead, “This objection has been shown to be vapid eight hundred times already, and there’s no reason to think it will suddenly become a credible objection this time, given that the Flat-Earthers putting it forward are offering nothing new.”

The former attitude is what is most definitive of the apologist: conviction that an objection to the apologist’s view that hasn’t yet been rationally refuted has simply got to be misguided precisely because it calls into question the apologist’s view. The apologist starts from this conviction and proceeds to look for the refutation that must be there.

I’m speaking of attitudes here because I want to stress that what is important for defining someone as an apologist is the subjective approach of the individual. If Joe sincerely believes, based on his exposure to the evidence and the history of dispute about the evidence, that a certain objection to his Flat-Earth position has been decisively refuted and for this reason dismisses it, he may be a dummy or an ignoramus or a dupe, but he isn’t an apologist for the Flat-Earth position. That label is reserved for those who assume the objection must be misguided simply because it challenges Flat-Earth-ism—and then set out to make that case (rather than being convinced, however mistakenly, that the case has been effectively made).

There are, however, some fine lines here. Suppose I am presented with novel evidence against the Round-Earth view, evidence that is legitimately hard to fit with the thesis that the earth is ball-shaped (no idea what such evidence would look like, but let’s pretend). I might approach this objection with extreme skepticism, pretty sure there must be something seriously wrong with it—because the case for the Round-Earth view is so overwhelmingly strong that rejecting that view on the basis of this new bit of evidence would require me to throw out a view with massive explanatory power. Thus supported by the strength of the Round-Earth view, I look for the problem with the objection to it, sure it must be there.

Am I an apologist?

My inclination here is to say that since “apologist” is a term of art it doesn’t much matter what answer one gives, so long as one makes the right sorts of distinctions. We could say that, in this case, I am being an apologist—but a very different sort of apologist than the ones who are convinced the objection to their view must be wrong out of pride or group loyalty or wishful thinking or something else along these lines. We might distinguish, then, between apologists who base their apologetic stance on the (perceived) weight of the evidence (call them “evidentially motivated apologists”), and those who base their stance on emotions or desires or other more affective motives (call them “affectively motivated apologists”). Or we might decide that the former isn’t an apologist at all, and reserve that term exclusively for the latter.

Either way, not all people of faith who have come to the intellectual defense of religion should be characterized as apologists. For example, I am a Christian theist who has defended the intellectual respectability of theistic religion—but with respect to the first and most significant feature of apologists, I don’t see myself as a good fit, since I am more than prepared to question very traditional Christian doctrines when my experience or exposure to critical challenges strikes me as warranting it.

This is not to say that I find every objection to Christian teachings to be credible. And some strike me as the same old unsound objections that have been decisively discredited before. But even then I try to take the time to explain why I think the objection doesn’t work…in part because my conversation partner may not have heard the reasons before even if they’re old hat to me, and in part because I want to make sure the reasons for setting aside the objection really are as convincing as I think.

With respect to the second characteristic feature of apologists, while I want to argue that theistic religion can be “reasonable” or intellectually respectable (although it needn’t be), I do not strive to show that intellectual respectability is limited to the theistic position. I know thoughtful, decent people from a range of religious standpoints: atheist, agnostic, Hindu, Sikh, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, etc. That theism can be intellectually respectable does not, on my view, entail that atheism cannot be. This is not a zero-sum contest where the reasonableness of my position depends on the unreasonableness of its alternatives. If I’m an apologist at all, then, I’d be a “friendly” apologist. (Not that I think of myself as an apologist at all, since I’d rather be an explorer than a defense attorney).

But here is where Burk’s challenge comes in. Burk argues, in effect, that I am presuming that religion can be intellectually respectable and then directing all my intellectual energies to the task of defending this position. But all the while I am unwittingly demonstrating the intellectual risibility of religion by making pronouncements for which there is no evidence (about such things as the universal benevolence of God)—a paradigmatically irrational thing to do that is utterly characteristic of religion in all its forms, even the one that I am trying to defend. In this sense, then, I am revealing myself as an apologist—so fixated on defending a position rather than investigating its merits that I fail to see what is plain to anyone looking at the position objectively.

If this is right, I embody the first and most central feature of an apologist—not with respect to traditional Christian doctrine, but with respect to the idea that theistic religion in a broad sense can be intellectually respectable. And when this idea is at issue, I might not even qualify as a friendly apologist. Burk doesn’t address this, but there’s certainly a case for saying that I embody the second characteristic feature of apologists when it comes to the question of whether religion can be intellectually respectable. After all, I think that those who challenge the intellectual respectability of religion in all its forms are not only mistaken but are making indefensibly sweeping generalizations. I have accused them of attacking religion from the outside, and hence from a stance defined by their own starting points which are not themselves being criticized but which are employed as the basis for condemning religion. I have said that this is the wrong way to make intellectual progress. In short, I am accusing those who regard all religion as irrational of being irrational.

In short, it might be argued that I am an adversarial apologist after all—not for the truth of traditional Christian doctrine, but for the view that religion in general, and theistic religion in particular (including Christianity) can be intellectually respectable (even if it isn’t always so).

In fact, I don’t think the argument for this conclusion works--primarily because I don't think Burk's case for attributing to me the central feature of an apologist works. But since this post has gotten plenty long already, I won’t tell you why (at least not here). Instead, I’ll ask you what you think (about these classifications, about where various people fall within them, and—if you like—about what you suspect I’d say in response to the argument pinning me as an adversarial apologist).

When Life Hands You Lemons...Getting Serious

So, my attempt at a light-hearted contest for while I was out of town pretty much fell flat. It generated but one response in the comments section of the blog--a response which, I think, was an attempt to caricature what the response's author took to be my views on what we should do when confronted with an undesired and (at least at first blush) unpleasant aspect of reality.

But I also got a phone-in response from my friend and co-author John. While not the kind of playful or silly response I was originally envisioning, it deserves to be posted here. And of the two entries, it is the clear winner. So, here, then, is the winning response to my failed contest:

When life hands you lemons, do what the stellar opera soprano Rosa Ponselle--before whom the great conductor Arturo Toscanini once went down on his knees--did with lemons. She sucked on them before she performed as a tonic for her vocal cords. In other words, when life hands you lemons, find in those lemons that which is of God, and drink deeply of that.

Dare I invite other, more serious reflections of this sort? For my own reflection on what to do when life hands you "lemons," you can check out this post.

[ad hoc] Christianity Interview

My interview with the guys at the [ad hoc] Christianity podcast is now available for your listening pleasure (or as a a basis for shouted invectives or mockery, depending on your ideological leanings). Check it out here.

While I'm out of town...

...please take the time to complete the following sentence:

"When life hands you a lemon..."

The most original, humorous, and relevant-to-themes-on-this-blog response will win a very special imaginary prize.

(Sample response: "...give yourself a papercut with you grandmother's copy of the King James Bible and then squeeze the lemon juice into the wound.")

Talbott vs. Loftus: Testing the Outsider Test of Faith

I recently stumbled across an essay by Tom Talbott--a Christian universalist like myself and a careful, thoughtful philosopher--that may be of interest to readers of this blog. It is an extended critical discussion of John Loftus's so-called "Outsider Test of Faith," which Loftus's fans seem to think is a profoundly insightful and important basis for critiquing religious belief.

In brief, the Outsider Test of Faith, or OTF, is (in Loftus's words) “a challenge to believers to test or examine their own religious faith as if they were outsiders with the same presumption of skepticism they use to test or examine other religious faiths.” I have addressed Loftus's OTF only once before on this blog, and then only in passing in a blog post about authorial voice. My interest in the OTF has been minimal largely because it seems to have no real bearing on the kind of religion I want to defend; instead, it poses a threat only to more fundamentalist and exclusivist expressions of religious belief--which I wish to criticize right along with Loftus. Here, in full, is what I've had to say about the OTF on this blog up to this moment:

This principle seems sound enough within its sphere of application, but it is clearly framed in response to an exclusivist brand of religious epistemology radically at odds with the pragmatic and neo-Hegelian approach that I find compelling—an approach which leads me to articulate an inclusivist respect for alternative religious traditions conditioned by what I call (in my book) “the logic of faith”—a logic which imposes standards on when it is morally and intellectually appropriate to live as if a hoped-for possibility is true. These standards are ones I apply to my own religious life as well as to the religious lives of others. It is according to these standards that I extend conditional respect to a diversity of religious traditions—the condition being that they fall within the parameters of the logic of faith. And it is according to these standards that I trenchantly oppose more fundamentalistic expressions of Christianity.


In other words, Loftus is not talking to people like me—whom he tends to dismiss rather precipitously on his blog as engaged in little more than intellectual gerrymandering to avoid atheist arguments. As far as I can tell, he never takes seriously the possibility that our perspective was arrived at through critical reflection in the light of a range of experiences, ideas, and arguments, including those pointed out by atheists like Loftus.

After reading Talbott's philosophical critique of Loftus's OTF, I now feel as if I may have been far too generous in my assessment. That point aside, one of the things I really liked about Talbott's essay was his emphasis, when it comes to evaluating religious faiths, on juxtaposing any sort of "outsider" test with a corresponding "insider" test. As Talbott puts it in the essay,

With respect to many of the world’s great religions, particularly the eastern religions, I no doubt remain an outsider in this sense: I have a far greater familiarity with, and intimate knowledge of, the Christian religion than I have in the case of these other religions. But for that very reason, I should be less (rather than more) prepared simply to dismiss that which I do not yet fully understand. And for a similar reason, a true outsider, whether a fundamentalist Christian or a crusading atheist, is the last person I would trust to evaluate a non-Christian religion accurately, whether it be Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, or Taoism. Such an outsider is also the last person I would trust to evaluate my own understanding of the Christian religion.

Here, Talbott is expressing one of the chief methodological points that I first had driven home for me by reading Hegel: We are well-positioned to be effectively critical of a worldview or philosophy only to the extent that we can "step into it" and see how the world looks from the inside. Criticism of belief systems falls flat when one tries to perform such criticism from the outside.

According to Hegel, one cannot engage in criticism from a vacuum. One needs a framework within which to conduct criticism--an outlook or philosophy which provides standards of criticism. And when outsiders to a particular philosophy or outlook criticize that philosophy or outlook as outsiders, what they are doing (often without realizing it) is bringing the presuppositions of their own philosophy or outlook with them. These presuppositions thus end up not being critiqued, and you have an essentially unproductive exercise: "Given all the presuppositions of theoretical  framework A (which are being embraced uncritically), theoretical framework B is to be rejected insofar as it holds x, y, and z (where x, y, and z refer to views in B that are at odds with the presuppositions of A)."

Hegel thought there was only one way to avoid such dogmatic criticism. You had to engage in criticism from within. And you are most qualified to engage in such internal criticism when the belief system in question is (you guessed it) your own. You subject your own worldview, your own philosophy, to critical assessment by assessing its internal consistency, by testing its capacity to make sense of your lived experience--in short, by attempting to live it out critically to see how well it works according to its own standards. When one does this, one's worldview does not remain static but becomes dynamic, constantly evolving in the light of lived experience and critical, internal reflection. This, for Hegel, is the only way to avoid dogmatism: focus most of your critical attention on your own belief system, rather than spending your energy criticizing everyone else's.

To paraphrase one of Hegel's intellectual predecessors: "Stop trying to remove that splinter from your neighbor's eye. First, remove the mote from your own."

Celebration of a Life: A Clown's Funeral

Funeral services are often billed as “celebrations” of the life of the person who has died. Usually this billing is a bit misleading. While the eulogy often includes fond reflections about the deceased, there is a sober tone to the proceedings that one doesn’t typically associate with celebrations. There is weeping. There is grieving. The service is a ritual of closure and farewell. The lost loved one is remembered and honored, and occasionally an anecdote inspires a chuckle among those who knew the person well.


“Memorialization” seems a better label than “celebration” for what is going on. And more often than not, memorialization is precisely what is called for, what the grieving family needs most. Perhaps they aren’t yet ready to celebrate, or perhaps—given who the person was—a celebration just isn’t the best way to say goodbye.

But some people live lives that cannot help but influence the character of their funeral. And sometimes the legacy is one that is best memorialized with laughter. So it was with my wife’s uncle, Otis—called Gunkle by my wife and children, and “Jingles” by those who knew him best in his role as a professional clown.

Since I already talked about Otis on this blog—shortly after his passing a few weeks ago—I won’t repeat my account of his life here. But for those who appreciated hearing about his life, I thought it might be fitting to share just a few anecdotes from the event that marked his passing from this life.

Apparently, it is traditional for clowns to attend the funeral of one of their own dressed as clowns. And Otis was one of their own. This funeral was not just for Otis Hornish, beloved uncle and great uncle, rugged adventurer, and friend. This was also the funeral for Jingles the Clown.

Not all of his clown colleagues came in full clown attire. Some only wore token gestures to the trade, such as a comical tie. But half a dozen did indeed walk into the chapel in oversized shoes, colorful rags, funny hats, and red-ball noses. My children, of course, were delighted.

Well… “of course” might not be quite appropriate. After all, clowns—like snakes and spiders—are an object of a very basic, instinctive human terror. I mean, imagine Bozo wandering into an ancient Greek fishing village. There’d be screaming, people hurling themselves into the Mediterranean to escape the horror. “Run!” mothers would cry to their children while fathers armed themselves with sticks and clubs, preparing to face down the monstrosity in their midst.

But in my kids’ case, having a beloved great uncle who was a clown helped to mitigate this natural aversion. And, of course, in the last few hundred years at least some of the instinctive human fear of clowns has been—like the fear of tigers—muted by their association with circuses and carnival events.

I’m teasing, of course. While some people do profess a fear of clowns, the clowns at Otis’s funeral would be unlikely to inspire fear (well, except for one, whom I was eyeing nervously for most of the afternoon). “Whimsical” is perhaps the best term to describe the unique gathering.

In the period just prior to the service itself, a number of people were milling about in the foyer outside the chapel where the service would be held—including my family and several clowns. One of the clowns—a sad-eyed hobo clown, approached my kids skittishly, holding out stickers for them as if afraid they might reject him. His performance, and the stickers, brought smiles but no fear. Another clown, a slovenly tribute to superheroes (with Superman’s “S” on his breast just above his pronounced pot belly), approached the hobo clown and took his hand in a wildly exaggerated handshake that went on and on, expressing a bizarre mix of earnest self-importance and buffoonery. The hero clown then came forward to shake my son’s hand.

The hobo clown felt compelled, at that point, to give the hero clown some unsolicited clowning advice—about how and when to approach children so as to respect their boundaries and not be a source of anything other than delight.

The slouching hero clown took offense. He muttered something about having been a clown for years, then stomped off into the chapel in his oversized shoes.

It was about as funny as anything I’ve seen in my life, and I’m still trying to decide if the final part of the performance was an act or not.

After the service, the clowns did what clowns do best. And that, of course, is to make balloon animals—and balloon flower bouquets, and balloon hats. My son and daughter were soon festooned in colorful creations. My daughter then turned to the task of pressing all the stickers she’d received onto the swollen abdomen of a pregnant relative.

I thought to myself, “Otis would love this.” And then I thought, “He does love this.” Because Otis—Jingles—was here. His spirit prevailed over this place, this gathering in his honor and his memory.

Matters of Taste: A correction on my last post...and a follow-up reflection

In a comment on my last post, JP brought up a comparison between moral matters and matters of taste, a comparison that was intended to call into question my purported contention that if values are wholly subjectivized, there is no longer anything to learn from engaging thoughtfully with the divergent value perspectives of others.


As I prepared to jot off a quick response to this, I realized I’d made a significant error in my last post—an error that made JP’s comment more credible, as well as making it considerably harder for me to quickly make the response I wanted to make. Specifically, in creating my previous post I referred to a true-false question that, at one time, I'd used in some of my classes. In course of preparing the post I found that question in my files and cut-and-pasted it into the post. But somehow the cut-and-pasted version disappeared in the course of completing the post. Rather than hunt it down again in my files, I recreated it from memory.

The resultant wording was this:

Consider the following statement: "We should be respectful of everyone’s opinion on moral matters. Only if we listen to each other and take what the other person has to say seriously are we going to open our minds and learn something new about morality." Someone who makes this statement is most likely an ethical subjectivist.

This, however, turns out to be more ambiguous than the original wording of the question. Where I wrote “learn something new about morality,” the original question said “learn something new about what is morally right and wrong.”

And this difference makes a big difference, since learning something about morality is a far broader thing, encompassing many more kinds of lessons, than what is encompassed in learning something about what is morally right and wrong.

Of course we can learn things about morality by listening to each other, even if morality is wholly subjective. And of course we can learn things about tastes by listening to each other, even if taste is wholly subjective. But it doesn’t follow that we can learn more about what really is moral or what really is tasty by such listening, if the truth about morality and taste is wholly subjective.

Consider a comparable statement relating to science. Suppose you’re a subjectivist about science. That is, you believe that all “truths” in science are wholly subjective. You might still agree that listening to others will teach you “something new about science,” given that the ambiguity of that phrasing allows the “something new” to include new discoveries about the history of science, the range of beliefs people have, etc. But if you’re a subjectivist about science, you won’t expect to learn anything new about scientific truth—for example, about the temperature at which ethanol actually boils, or the typical behavior of electrons in an oxygen atom. If you really are a subjectivist on scientific truth, then you’ll believe that whatever attitudes you happen to have are the standard of truth on this matter, and hence that there is nothing for you to learn.

So, consider the following disambiguated parallel statement regarding taste:

“We should be respectful of everyone’s opinion on matters of culinary taste. Only if we listen to each other and take what the other person has to say seriously are we going to open our minds and learn something new about what tastes good and what doesn’t.”

If what tastes good is simply a function of what I happen to enjoy when I taste it, then clearly there is nothing new to learn about what tastes good (to me) and what tastes bad (to me) by listening to what other people enjoy and don’t enjoy eating—even if I might learn lots of interesting stuff about them. So if we’re complete subjectivists about tastes, then the disambiguated statement makes little sense. While I might learn things “about matters of taste” from open discourse with others, I won’t learn anything about what tastes good and what doesn’t. For that, I just have to consult my own subjective responses.

Nevertheless, I think there is more to be said on this matter. Even disambiguated in this way, the statement about tastes doesn’t seem like something we want to wholly dismiss. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that we’re not as wholly subjective about matters of taste as we often like to think.

But I believe there’s another reason. Specifically, even if we agree that taste is wholly subjective, if there are broader values which are not wholly subjective then there might be compelling reasons to expand our tastes, that is, to come to like (to “find tasty”) things that we had not previously liked. And while we wouldn’t learn anything new about what tastes good and what doesn’t from open discourse with people whose tastes differ from our own, we might come to like things we didn’t like before. Some things that previously hadn’t tasted good to us might start to taste good because someone pointed out flavors and nuances we’d never attended to, or because we decided to give it a try enough to acquire a taste for it.

And liking more things might mean enriching our lives in valuable ways.

Let’s assume that there are no objective standards that ever make it inappropriate to like some foods and not others. Culinary taste would then be, as I see it, unlike humor, for reasons discussed at length in an earlier post: to be amused by certain things (say the deliberate psychological abuse of another person) is just inappropriate, and so deliberately cultivating a taste for such things is similarly inappropriate. You’re not enriching your life by acquiring a taste for the humiliation of racial minorities. Rather, you’re acquiring a new vice and thus making the world a worse place. But if taste is wholly subjective, there is no such constraint, no objective reason not to expand one’s tastes so as to be able to find pleasure in more foods

And there would be a reason to find culinary pleasure in more things, assuming that such pleasure is good all else being equal. In other words, if we adopt a broader values framework that attaches presumptive objective value to the pleasures associated with eating—a values framework that holds such pleasure to be a value worth cultivating in the absence of any reason not to—the increase in pleasure opportunities resulting from expanding one’s tastes becomes a reason to seek to expand one’s tastes whether one is so inclined or not.

And so, if taste is wholly subjective but other values pertaining to what makes for a good life are not wholly subjective (such as the worth of expanding the range of culinary pleasures in one's life), there may well be compelling reason to seek to expand one’s culinary tastes broadly. And since listening to why other people enjoy what they enjoy can help in this process, there is reason to engage in attentive discussions about taste even if taste is wholly subjective. One might, thereby, come to like new things, thereby enriching one’s life.

(There are also culturally constructed values related to the art of cooking that deserve attention here as well, but I have run out of time for today).