Hypatia wrote:

I see no problem, unless nondualism is being discounted as a form of theism. You could easily say that neither good nor evil has any genuine substance, and ultimate reality lies beyond all such concepts.

Omnibenevolence is the one attribute I have the most difficulty making sense of, and one of the places where I'm really suspicious of analogical reasoning. I can follow the ontological argument as far as necessary vs. contingent existence goes, but I don't know what a divine perfection is.

 
I'm curious about this. What do you take "good" to be? And why wouldn't God be good? And how and why do you think God could lack such a predicate?

Hypatia wrote:

Miguel wrote:

Hypatia wrote:

I see no problem, unless nondualism is being discounted as a form of theism. You could easily say that neither good nor evil has any genuine substance, and ultimate reality lies beyond all such concepts.

Omnibenevolence is the one attribute I have the most difficulty making sense of, and one of the places where I'm really suspicious of analogical reasoning. I can follow the ontological argument as far as necessary vs. contingent existence goes, but I don't know what a divine perfection is.

 
I'm curious about this. What do you take "good" to be? And why wouldn't God be good? And how and why do you think God could lack such a predicate?

Well, the underlying issue is whether moral realism is correct or not. If it is not, then "good" has to be ultimately fictional. Applying it as an attribute of God would just be a somewhat more sophisticated form of anthropomorphism.

The success of something like PSR is not dependent upon moral realism being true, so it seems that God could exist even if an objective notion of goodness did not. If we have independent reasons to accept moral realism, however, then I think omnibenevolence does make sense (at least as long as what is "good" for us isn't so simply for biological reasons that could have been otherwise), 

 

Still, you would grant that we live in a moral landscape, right? Whatever the accout, we recognize good and bad things, and we have basic ethical codes corresponding to what we think would be desirable for a person. Whatever the metaphysical account of the good, it is just an objective, obvious fact that we *care* about normativity. We care about the good, and we care about normative ethical rules, and we value virtues and what we call moral righteousness and justice. We aren't irrational creatures living lives without any ethical codes or ethical pursuits. We are rational creatures with the power of coming up with a moral language, and we live in an ordered world that gives us the opportunity to exercise this moral understanding and living virtuously. If (A) God cares about normativity, the idea of goodness and of virtuous living, then this moral landscape is explicable and in fact something we would expect God to create and keep in existence. However, if (B) God is indifferent about what we humans call morality and virtuous living, then the fact that the world is the way it is (with a moral landscape, with rational and free creatures interested in morality, culture and virtuous living) would be surprising, not something that we could expect.

This makes it the case that the hypothesis of God as a virtuous being who cares about such notions of justice and goodness would be better supported by the existence of a moral landscape. It is something that traditional theism could explain and lead us to expect, whilst "indifferent theism" wouldn't explain it. And if God is virtuous and cares about morality in a manner similar to ours, what else is left to discuss? Wouldn't we just go ahead and accept benevolence (and, in fact, omnibenvolence considering God has no limits) a plausible attribute of God, regardless of how we ultimately understand goodness in metaphysics?

A further relevant question is how we could explain God's creation of the world. If God doesn't love the universe, why would He create it? He's entirely perfect in Himself already, being an omnipotent necessary being of pure existence. Why would He choose to create us if He didn't find some good in us? The idea that the good would be riddled with malicious intentions for an omnipotent being seems frankly ridiculous to me. If God created us, that can only be because He values us: He loves us, and He desired to give us existence. Pseudo-Dionysius, along with Aquinas, held that God created the world because it is natural for the Good to be diffusive. If God were not Good, it seems we would have no explanation for any contingent creation whatsoever. But if God is good and loving, then we can make some sense of the idea of creating the universe, and especially the creation of a universe like ours, with rational creatures and a moral landscape.

I think these two questions are often ignored when discussing God's goodness, and I think they can be sufficient to get us to omnibenevolence, wholly apart from thomistic arguments about God's goodness. But I also think the thomistic arguments are particularly powerful, unless you insist on the is-ought problem and treating "the good" as if it were some kind of non-natural property. If we accept some kind of basic, natural goodness - and that seems to me quite evident - then God's goodness as Perfect Being, and in particular as an omniscient, therefore rational, being, seems hard to deny.

What do you think?

Last edited by Miguel (5/05/2018 6:47 pm)

Well, to get an argument from morality off the ground, I think you need to start from the perspective that humans view the world from a uniquely privileged perspective. I've developed some Aristotelian leanings and am comfortable saying that our ability to reason has transformed the type of cooperation that we see in other mammals into something new, but it's less clear to me that this is the only evolutionary path that could end in rationality. If we are but one of infinite ways of relating to reality, then you can't point to something specific to humans like morality and say that it only makes sense if God cares about virtue. I don't think it necessarily represents a new dimension of existence in the same way that I would say consciousness does.

As to your second point about Creation, I think it's worth remembering that outside of the Abrahamic religions, it's pretty common to view God and the universe as co-eternal. There may be no overarching purpose to the existence of our universe and ourselves--it may instead simply be in God's nature to eternally create. I'm happy favoring something closer to the Christian picture of reality because even the non-naturalistic alternatives strike me as nihilistic, but I don't think that theism more broadly rises and falls with it.

I do think the sort of reasoning behind the ontological argument is interesting (which seems to be Rescher's direction too?), but it always sets off my skepticism.

Miguel wrote:

Still, you would grant that we live in a moral landscape, right? Whatever the accout, we recognize good and bad things, and we have basic ethical codes corresponding to what we think would be desirable for a person. Whatever the metaphysical account of the good, it is just an objective, obvious fact that we *care* about normativity. We care about the good, and we care about normative ethical rules, and we value virtues and what we call moral righteousness and justice. We aren't irrational creatures living lives without any ethical codes or ethical pursuits. We are rational creatures with the power of coming up with a moral language, and we live in an ordered world that gives us the opportunity to exercise this moral understanding and living virtuously. If (A) God cares about normativity, the idea of goodness and of virtuous living, then this moral landscape is explicable and in fact something we would expect God to create and keep in existence. However, if (B) God is indifferent about what we humans call morality and virtuous living, then the fact that the world is the way it is (with a moral landscape, with rational and free creatures interested in morality, culture and virtuous living) would be surprising, not something that we could expect.

Hah. Some of these arguments are old as philosophy. On the one hand, we have intuitions of value; on the other, different people's intuitions suggest that the same things are both good and bad. How, then, can we infer from these intuitions that there is an objective standard of good?

The point can be read out of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche argues (i) if a term has two distinct contraries, it also has two distinct meanings; (ii) “good” has two distinct contraries (i.e. roughly “base” and “evil”); hence (iii), we have two distinct notions of good (i.e. the “noble” and “slave” moralities), and (he goes on to argue) the second is practically a reversal of the first. (cf. Plato's Protagoras 332d – 333b.) Now, if the Christian “slave morality” is a reversal of the pre-Christian “noble morality”, we have reason to doubt that people's intuitions reflect static, eternal norms.

You might reply, at this point, that all men seek the good even though they disagree as to what it is. Nietzsche would, I think, throw that point into contention. Is it obvious that people all seek the good? (Have you interacted with people lately? Is that really how it seems to you?) And if it seems that they do, he might offer another explanation of the appearance (e.g. the will to power and, perhaps, self-deception). Nietzsche will say that these appearances (and the aforementioned historical details) are precisely what you should expect if his explanation is right.

Are Nietzsche's views compatible with theism? Well, perhaps, if you assume a Kant-like conception of God as ineffable. (Nietzsche starts by assuming Kant's arguments against God succeed.) But anyway, there is a glance at the "abyss" Hypatia has been staring into too long.

John West wrote:

Miguel wrote:

Still, you would grant that we live in a moral landscape, right? Whatever the accout, we recognize good and bad things, and we have basic ethical codes corresponding to what we think would be desirable for a person. Whatever the metaphysical account of the good, it is just an objective, obvious fact that we *care* about normativity. We care about the good, and we care about normative ethical rules, and we value virtues and what we call moral righteousness and justice. We aren't irrational creatures living lives without any ethical codes or ethical pursuits. We are rational creatures with the power of coming up with a moral language, and we live in an ordered world that gives us the opportunity to exercise this moral understanding and living virtuously. If (A) God cares about normativity, the idea of goodness and of virtuous living, then this moral landscape is explicable and in fact something we would expect God to create and keep in existence. However, if (B) God is indifferent about what we humans call morality and virtuous living, then the fact that the world is the way it is (with a moral landscape, with rational and free creatures interested in morality, culture and virtuous living) would be surprising, not something that we could expect.

Hah. Some of these arguments are old as philosophy. On the one hand, we have intuitions of value; on the other, different people's intuitions suggest that the same things are both good and bad. How, then, can we infer from these intuitions that there is an objective standard of good?

The point can be read out of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche argues (i) if a term has two distinct contraries, it also has two distinct meanings; (ii) “good” has two distinct contraries (i.e. roughly “base” and “evil”); hence (iii), we have two distinct notions of good (i.e. the “noble” and “slave” moralities), and (he goes on to argue) the second is practically a reversal of the first. (cf. Plato's Protagoras 332d – 333b.) Now, if the Christian “slave morality” is a reversal of the pre-Christian “noble morality”, we have reason to doubt that people's intuitions reflect static, eternal norms.

You might reply, at this point, that all men seek the good even though they disagree as to what it is. Nietzsche would, I think, throw that point into contention. Is it obvious that people all seek the good? (Have you interacted with people lately? Is that really how it seems to you?) And if it seems that they do, he might offer another explanation of the appearance (e.g. the will to power and, perhaps, self-deception). Nietzsche will say that these appearances (and the aforementioned historical details) are precisely what you should expect if his explanation is right.

Are Nietzsche's views compatible with theism? Well, perhaps, if you assume a Kant-like conception of God as ineffable. (Nietzsche starts by assuming Kant's arguments against God succeed.) But anyway, there is a glance at the "abyss" Hypatia has been staring into too long.

 
I don't think considerations of this sort affect the arguments I gave now, as it seems to me they'd be compatible with a wide range of views on morality. But anyway, on the issue of the good I really think it obvious that all men seek the good. "Will to power" as a concept itself could only make sense if first thrre is something like the good which is that which we desire.

I think Wittgenstein can be especially useful when discussing metaethics, because it seems to me that more often than not people's problems with moral realism and moral objectivism actually spring from linguistic and philosophical confusion. Witt once commented on suicide saying that of course it made no sense for him to desire it, in the sense, I gather, that suicide is in itself completely pointless and irrational (destroying oneself in order to improve one's condition, say). I won't spell it out now, but I think a similar reasoning can be applied to the very concept of goodness, and to say it's not real or objective would pretty much be to misunderstand or misuse the concept.