PHILOSOPHICAL WRITINGS
PHILOSOPHICAL SMORGASBORD - 1996
I. MORALITY AND THE PRODUCTS OF HOLLYWOOD
MERRILL RING
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
As we all know, Senator Dole and William Bennett have been after the entertainment industry, especially Hollywood, for creating immoral products. Contemporary movies are said to be a significant cause of our current undesirable moral condition.
Again as we all know, a considerable portion of that criticism rests upon political, in the narrow sense, calculation. The aim is to gain for themselves some political advantage in search for higher office. Whether that will be a useful device for attaining that end may be doubtful. But simply because some of the aim behind the raising of the issue has a self-seeking point does not mean that the issue is not worth discussing as a political, in a broader and more respectable sense, topic.
It is not perfectly clear from the Dole and Bennett broadsides whether the suggested cure is censorship or self-denial. Certainly, censorship runs counter to the Republican ideology of the day: let's get government off our backs! To have an imposed censorship on the entertainment industry is precisely to put government on our backs, although at a point where we now have that sole Republican good, freedom. On the other hand, while a bureaucratic censorship might conflict with Republican ideology, that of course does not prevent some important Republicans and affiliated organizations from seeking such restriction of freedom.
Suppose on the contrary that what is being requested by Dole and Bennett is self-imposed censorship, that the industry acquire and internalize a set of moral guidelines which shall mean that movies and such which are contrary to that set of principles simply will not be produced. The problem here is the unlikelihood of modern capitalism acquiring any such set of principles: the market, dearly beloved of the elephants, does not encourage self-restraint. And so we are led back to censorship.
However, there is another problem, no matter whether it is urged that there be governmental censorship, self-restraint or some intermediate form such as bureaucratic censorship run by the industry but in one way or another required by the government. The history of such censorship in this country, produces two conclusions. One is that, this being a Christian country, violence will be judged more leniently than sex. More importantly, quality will be sacrificed in the interests of mechanically understood and applied standards.
The issue of quality is central to the discussion, though it is hard to discern that from the available material.
Dole and Bennett would join with their Gingrichian Republican counterparts in eliminating public support for public television and radio. What are these institutions but attempts to provide higher quality products than can be found on the free market? And is not the desire to eliminate them, by eliminating public funding, precisely contrary to the other expressed desire to improve the quality of entertainment? What we need, one thing we need, is a government supported movie studio which will produce movies of as high a quality as the products of public television and public radio. (In fact, I do not want to be committed to saying that those products are as good as they could be - we are not generous enough in providing for those public entities, as we are not generous in providing for the poor, where generosity is to be measured both in terms of financial commitment and also in terms of freedom from administrative, i.e. governmental, control.) Only when we see what can be done by a decently funded and politically independent public movie studio, i.e. a movie studio governmentally supported on the analogy of public television and public radio, will we be in a position to evaluate exactly what the moral issues are in the production of American entertainment.
II.
DECONSTRUCTION, NIETZSCHE AND CAUSATION
MERRILL RING
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
In my continuing though sporadic attempts to learn something about deconstruction, I came across a book by Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticsm after Structuralism. Culler is a literature professor at Cornell, has written a lot on recent (literary) theory, and is widely referred to, by philosophers as well as by other literary theorists. This particular book seems to me quite useful and readable.
After a longish (and interesting) first chapter about reading, Culler turns in Chapter 2 to deconstruction. After beginning by citing some abstract definitions of deconstruction, he says "These descriptions of deconstruction differ in their emphases. To see how the operations they invoke might converge in practice, consider a case that lends itself to brief exposition, the Nietzschean deconstruction of causality." [Note: what Culler talks about is not a Nietzschean but rather Nietzsche's deconstruction of causality.]
For anyone curious about deconstruction, Culler presents a wonderful opportunity: the introduction of a paradigm case of deconstruction from which one can learn what the activity is. However, the outcome of pursuing that opportunity is not what Culler imagines. Nietzsche's deconstruction of causality turns out to be a philosophical mess and if that case is paradigmatic, as Culler presents it, then deconstruction turns out to a quite confused intellectual activity.
In what follows I do not distinguish Nietzsche from Culler. I assume that Culler gets him right. In the long run, of course that would have to be looked into.
Culler starts the presentation of his examplar with what looks to be a reminder. "Causality is a basic principle of our universe. We could not live or think as we do without taking for granted that one event causes another, that causes produce effects." The trouble begins in the next sentence. "The principle of causality asserts the logical and temporal priority of cause to effect."
In there invoking 'the principle of causality', Culler does not have in mind what is usually meant by philosophers when they speak of the principle of causality. For we mean the principle that every event has a cause. (It should be noticed that the philosopher's principle of causality is what he was referring to in his opening sentence.) However, Culler speaks of the principle of causality as asserting "the logical and temporary priority of cause to effect."
Thus what Culler has in mind, and what he will take to be the object of Nietzsche's deconstructive activity, is not the idea that every event has a cause, but rather the principle that causes precede effects.
This claim about causation is certainly something that we philosophers are familiar with. Hume, perhaps more than anyone, reminded us that precedence of cause to effect is part of what is meant when we human beings say 'X caused Y'. On the other hand, it is not at all apparent what Culler means when he speaks of the "logical" priority of cause to effect. Hume's aim was to remind us that causes have a "temporal" priority - if X is to be the cause of Y, X must precede Y in time. One guess as to what Culler has in mind when he speaks not about temporal priority but logical priority concerns the word "must" in the formula 'to be a cause X must precede Y in time'. But that modal term is not intended to say that causes have a logical priority in time - rather it asserts that it is logically necessary that causes have temporal precedence to effects.
So much for clarification, both of what is important and what is not. The upshot of Culler's stage setting is that we must presume that Nietzsche's deconstruction of causality is the deconstruction of the principle that, necessarily, causes temporally precede effects. There may be more to the activity, but that is all that a reader is given reason to anticipate.
What is it, then, that Nietzsche held in connection with the principle of the temporal precedence of causes? The following is presented by Culler as Nietzsche's view. "But ... this concept of causal structure is not something given as such but rather the product of a precise tropological or rhetorical operation, a ... chronological reversal."
This sentence presents one of the main claims in the argument. What must first be noticed is that it concerns the way in which we (human beings) come to have what is called "that concept of causal structure". 'That concept' is surely intended to refer to the previously mentioned principle that what we can call a 'cause' is, must be, something which precedes in time what we call its effect(s). Only now Nietzsche refers to the principle as about causal "structure". And of course one can see why he takes it to specify something structural about causality. The concept of causality includes a principle which structures the temporal relationship between what we can speak of as a cause and what we can think of as its effects. Causes precede effects.
The key claim of Nietzsche's in the quoted sentence certainly amounts to a specification of how it is that we come to build into the concept of causality the principle that causes precede effects - or more briefly how it is that we come to have that principle.
I would like you to observe that there is nothing in Nietzsche's words about how Hume, or for that matter any other philosopher, came to believe a (perhaps dubious) principle about causality, namely that causes must precede effects. Instead Nietzsche is making a claim about the concept of causality, or at least about a piece of it. It is a claim about us, about human beings who have that concept and not about philosophers who try to understand the concept. So if is what is transpiring here is a deconstruction of causality, a paradigm of deconstruction, then deconstructing must have something to do with concepts and with the human beings who have them and not with philosophical attempts to understand those concepts.
The discussion, then, is about how we come to possess a certain concept. Now all of us recognize that theme: shall we be rationalists or empiricists about concept acquisition? Here then is where we start doing philosophy. But I have worries - will Nietzsche keep it straight between the concept's being ours (we human's) and not a philosophical creation and philosophical accounts of how we come to have a certain principle built into our concept?
Nietzsche supplies in that crucial line two options for how the concept of causality (or the relevant feature of it) is acquired - and it is clearly suggested that one of the options is to be rejected, the other to be accepted.
The principle of temporal priority, it is said, is "not something given as such". Nietzsche must be thinking that the most likely answer to the question of how we come to have the concept/the principle of temporal priority is that we learn from experience that causes precede effects. The task of deconstructing causality, then, is to be understood as sited in a context which presupposes that the entrenched position, the opponent's view, is empiricist. What is being fought against is the myth of the (sensorily) given. Deconstruction here is opposing the idea (and expecting it to be the dominant idea) that we build up our concepts from sensory experience.
It might have been important in Nietzsche's day to object to an empiricist account of how the principle that causes precede effects is acquired, of how it is to be justified. And it might even be breathtaking to a literary theorist of today. But hardly any philosophers are running around today who would accept, much less promulgate, the empiricist line about this matter. About this issue the vast majority of us are already Kantians (of whatever variety.) And because that is so, because Kantianism in this matter has won out over empiricism, we might anticipate that what Nietzsche and deconstruction has to say on this subject will not be very striking.
There is more however. For Nietzsche produces a positive account of how the principle in question is acquired/justified. The positive claim is that the principle that causes must precede effects is produced ("the product of") by a "precise" (why 'precise'?) "tropological or rhetorical operation, a ... chronological reversal".
There are several things to be said about that positive thesis. First, I think it is an attempt to say that the principle is not to be understood as acquired or justified by anything like logic. Rather, we are to talk about rhetoric, not logic.
But leave that for now. What I chiefly want to call to your attention is that though the thesis rejects the standard empiricist answer to the question of how we come to have the idea that causes must precede effects, an answer which refers to what is given in sense, what is given in experience, that thesis is none the less not otherwise a Kantian answer. For it suggests that we do, after all, come to have the concept from experience - only it is not directly acquired from experience but through a (perverse? literary?) rearrangement of actual experience, a temporal reorganization of what is given. What we seem to have in Nietzsche is a new and unusual form of empiricism.
In Culler's text there is next presented the example which is to show us how the concept really does come about, how we come to have it, how the principle can be justified or at least explained. The example is about pain and a pin. Walking barefoot through the hall, one screams; after hopping about wildly one returns to the scene of the pain and looks around: and discovers in one's trail a thumb-tack. We tell a friend 'Stepped on a tack this morning - then terrible pain in the foot.' We have discovered the cause, what hurt us. Consider, however, Nietzsche's account: "Suppose one feels a pain. This causes one to look for a cause and spying, perhaps, a pin, one posits a link and reverses the perceptual or phenomenal order, pain ... pin, to produce a causal sequence, pin ... pain."
In one way we should have no qualms about Nietzsche's description of how experience goes, of the order of experience. What we must realize, however, is that that description of experience is held to be not just the discovery of what caused a particular event but the account of how it is that we acquire the concept of cause with its built-in principle that causes precede effects. For those of us with a Kantian bent (which I think on this topic includes most philosophers today) that is simply crazy. In fact, our search down the hallway for the cause of the pain in the foot, presupposes the principle that causes have temporal priority - that is why we search back down the hallway where we have already been rather than looking down the hall where we have not yet been or waiting two days to see what comes to exist in the vicinity of our pain. If Nietzsche thinks that the causal principle is a generalization of our experience in the hall, as it is obvious he does, then he has a lot of talking to do about why we conduct ourselves as we do.
And that further talking must include a discussion of how it is that we human beings all individually decide to engage in that precise reversal and marvelously come to the same conclusion that causes precede effects. In short, Nietzsche here shares with the traditional empiricists the idea that concept acquisition is an individual matter and so is then faced with the quite amazing outcome that we all agree in these broad features of our concepts.
Recall that Culler was presenting the example from Nietzsche of the "deconstruction of causality" as a paradigm example of deconstruction. The outcome of the investigation, however, is that causality, the concept of causality, was not in the least involved here. That is, there was no deconstructive criticism of a concept at all. Rather one philosophical account of how a certain concept is acquired was rejected in favor of another one - and the new one shares with the old one empiricist assumptions about concept formation (and shows no awareness of Kant and Kantian views at all.) That is striking, for deconstruction seems to promise more, namely a criticism of concepts that we human beings have rather than just a rejection of what some philosophers have had to say about those concepts.
Culler continues. "Let us be explicit about what this simple example implies. First, it does not lead to the conclusion that the principle of causality is illegitimate and should be scrapped." As far as I can see, only some one who did not pay attention to what actually goes on in Nietzsche's example could think that the illegitimacy of the might conceivably be an outcome. For the principle itself, that causes precede effects, was never in question. All that was up for grabs was a particular philosophical account of how we human beings have come to have that principle.
Culler goes on to give an additional reason for not rejecting causality itself (or the principle of causal priority) on the basis of the deconstruction. "On the contrary, the deconstruction itself relies on the notion of cause: the experience of pain ... causes us to discover the pin and thus causes the production of a cause." But those pieces of causation involved in the story are not what saves the principle of causality from rejection here. That conclusion, that causality is saved because it is something relied upon in the deconstructive inquiry, is a completely overblown idea of what is actually in question in the example. (And anyway, there was not the "production of a cause" in our adventures in the hallway but the discovery of a cause. Of course Culler's way of putting is no doubt an important part of the deconstructive view.)
The remainder of the paragraph, worked through, reveals continuing confusion on Culler's part about what was at issue was in the example and also a continuing inability to see that there is a difference between the concepts that are the subject of philosophical inquiry and the outcomes of those inquiries, i.e. the particular (and often peculiar) philosophical views about the nature of those concepts investigated.
What Culler goes on to do in the remainder of the relevant text is to attempt to bring out certain typical deconstructive attitudes as a consequence of the present example. These are such matters as the deconstructive critic must use the very notions being deconstructed; that the aim of the deconstruction is to deny the notion of any justification even though it must play a role in the criticism; and a bunch of stuff about how the outcome of deconstruction is an anti-hierarchization view, an attack on metaphysical privilege. The problem, of course, is that because of the complete confusion of what the issues are in the bit of deconstruction concerning causality none of these consequences are at all relevant or interesting.
Do all pieces of deconstruction share the same confusions as this supposed paradigm? Do they all make the same assumptions? That must be a further story.
III.
REALISM AND ANTI-REALISM IN THE ABORTION DEBATE
MERRILL RING
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
Ronald Dworkin's argument concerning abortion in Life's Dominion (1993) will probably sink without effect.
Dworkin's ambitions for it were large. He had noticed how the immense difference of opinion about abortion in the United States was seriously distorting our political life. His aim in the book was to produce a new perspective on abortion which would reduce the intellectual gap between the opposing views and, in consequence, to reduce the social and political conflict generated by abortion.
It does not look as if those aims have been, or will be, even modestly achieved. Of course, in a slightly longer run, Dworkin's solution might come to seem acceptable and produce a reduction of tensions. I doubt that it will, however. For both Dworkin's solution and his analysis of the intellectual issues involved in the abortion discussion are inadequate.
His project was, first, to claim that the real issue about abortion does not have to do with whether a fetus is a person. While there is truth, as I shall note below, in holding that that is not the real issue, the question becomes: what does Dworkin offer as the issue? He attempts to make the discussion revolve around the notion of "the sacredness of human life". The reconciliatory move is then is to insist that both sides (or all sides) in the argument about abortion agree that life is sacred. If so, the gap between the contending parties is greatly narrowed - no more is the problem a 'Yes or No' issue about whether a fetus is a person, but a matter of working within a common framework about the importance of life (or at least human life.)
Of course, it does not take much insight on the part of anti-abortionists to recognize that defenders of abortion need not, and do not, in any interesting way, regard life as sacred. Consequently, the anti-abortionist is not going to be led by Dworkin's account to feel in the slightest reconciled to the other side. It is a simple matter to observe that Dworkin himself claims human life is sacred and yet countenances abortion in many circumstances. Conversely, many, though far from all, who find abortion permissible, will hold their noses when told that they view human life as sacred. They may actually breathe a sigh of relief when their opponents aren't taken in by Dworkin.
One must sympathize with Dworkin's aims of reducing the political tension in the United States over abortion. But effecting a reconciliation of the intellectual positions concerning abortion is not the way to accomplish that mitigation of tension. In the past, my own thought was that perhaps abortion could be traded for gun control: the left allowing abortion to be made illegal, the right in exchange allowing gun possession to be illegal. That would be a purely political horse-swap without any idea of intellectual reconciliation. Of course that trade turns out to be most unlikely, but at least that program does not do what Dworkin attempted: to make the views over the permissibility of abortion to be more alike than they are or can be.
That leads to the central question: What has the argument about abortion to do with? There are two major troubles, one of which Dworkin, vaguely, and others more clearly, have noticed.
A columnist of conservative bent wrote recently that he had come to realize that anti-abortion groups were all religious. He may have been more than a little dense, but the connection between being actively opposed to abortion and having certain religious views is the central fact in the entire discussion. And Dworkin, being not at all dense, was not oblivious to that connection: that is precisely why he attempts to perform his reconciliation by asserting that all parties view human life as sacred. That description is a concession to the anti-abortion party that religion is centrally involved in the argument.
At bottom, the argument over abortion has to do with whether or not a religious understanding of human life shall hold sway. The anti-abortion party finds their religious form of thought under attack by policies which make abortion permissible.
That form of thought will not be reconciled by any argument, such as Dworkin's, which tries to smooth over the differences in conceptions of human life.
Moreover, Dworkin is wrong in saying that the issue is not about whether the fetus is a person. For it is, again, precisely in that issue where the underlying disagreement about whether the universe and human life is the province of a divine being is expressed. The anti-abortion party holds that something is made a person by the possession of a soul, that souls are supplied by God, and that provision of a soul is held, in the modern doctrine, to occur at conception.
Now of course, that is a complex set of theses. The position might be changed by believers coming to hold that it is not at conception but sometime later that God supplies a soul to a fetus. If that change were made, then abortion would probably lose its status as a social/political flashpoint. However, I see no evidence that such a possible manner of altering the debate is in the offing, even remotely plausible. The anti-abortion party has dug in its heels, and conception is the only time when they will allow that God intervenes in the normal course of the development of a person.
I am less concerned here, however, with the religious issue involved in the abortion discussion than I am with what I earlier claimed to be an additional fundamental intellectual difference between the contending parties. The reason is that this second background matter is much less noticed in understanding the differences about abortion than is the religious difference. Consider the contention that what makes a fetus into a person and so a member of the moral community is that at some point in its history, specifically at conception, God inserts a soul into the fetus. What this amounts to, putting the religious aspect aside, is the idea that there is something definite about that entity, the fetus, which determines whether it is a person or not. To learn whether it is a person, what we have to do is, as it were, look very carefully at the thing itself. Now of course, one doesn't see a soul - in this instance one has to rely on, as it were, theory, that is religious belief, that the soul is there.
Many of those who think that abortion is permissible, Dworkin for instance, talk as if the situation is more or less as the opponents of abortion describe it, as being one of finding some fact about the entity, the fetus, which will entitle us to say that it becomes, when that feature is exhibited, a person. Dworkin holds, as do many others, that the crucial point arrives when there are enough synaptic connections in the fetal brain for there to be a physical possibility of sensation, etc.
But to present the situation as one in which the opponents and supporters of abortion agree (religious matters aside) that the issue is one of when the relevant person-making and so morality making feature, appears in the fetus, is to smudge over a huge chasm in the views.
For what Dworkin and those who find abortion permissible are assuming is that it is not a matter of determination where to draw the line between personhood and not. Rather the view is that there is nothing fixed, in the nature of things, about where the line is to be drawn. We humans have to come to some rational conclusion, taken in view of the facts and perhaps theories and perhaps other, broader, considerations about human life as it is being lived, that such and such would be the best place to classify some developing entity as a person.
On the other hand, those who oppose abortion think that there cannot be any choice, even rational, about the matter. They are searching for a place to say 'Lo a person', where there is a fact of the matter, where something about the entity makes it inescapably necessary for any human agent under any set of circumstances to say 'A person'. Conception does that nicely - though if God were recorded to have said, e.g. 'The 24th day', that then would be the end of the matter.
That is why I wish to say that opponents of abortion are realists in this matter and the view which allows abortion are anti-realist. That may sound odd, as we think that provision of a soul is not a realist position, but I think it is intended to be exactly such a view, although the realism does not derive from scientific considerations as is typical. In contrast, once one starts looking for a reasonable place to draw a line, it is being allowed that there is no fact of the matter which determines the outcome, but rather a host of facts, of various sorts, and in consequence a socially made judgment. That sort of view is of the sort which is called anti-realist in today's philosophical lexicon.
And different decisions, reasonable decisions, might be made under different circumstances. I have been impressed for a long time with reports of a tribe (the details I have forgotten) who suffered under significantly high newborn mortality. As a consequence, they did not give their newborns a name until after the period of time they had determined was the most dangerous had passed (3 days as I recall). Up to that time, though no doubt the newborn was very well cared for, if the infant died it was (no doubt with some sadness) tossed on the trash heap. After naming, after induction into the social order, it became a person and was entited to be treated as persons would - though this did not mean with increased care.
I hold that under the circumstances that was a perfectly rational and morally acceptable practice.
Personally I think that the most defensible line for us has been and perhaps still is birth - for that is when the infant does become part of the social world, a separate being with all the standing of a person.
Notice how this is so contrary to the view implicit in the pro-life account. It is held that there is some fact of the matter, where that means some fact independent of human decision and practice, which rationally and morally determines that such and such is a person. They are realists - both in terms of classification and in terms of morality. I am urging that we should see the abortion-permissible position as anti-realist, but not nominalist. The decisions are not arbitrary - how we decide is tied to the facts of the situation and the case. But we are not marking out the only possible way of drawing a line. And I am further advocating that it is with entrance into the world, that one might very reasonably indicate that it is that social decision making which rules.
Note: The anti-abortionist fear of human decision making comes out in Dworkin's Life's Dominion in a different context. Dworkin is famous for distinguishing two different interpretations of the American Constitution under the headings 'a constitution of detail' and a 'constitution of principle'. The 'constitution of detail' is connected with the better known phrase 'the doctrine of original intent'. Why is that view of the nature of the constitution favored by conservatives, the same people who oppose abortion?
Dworkin says that the attraction of the doctrine of original intent is based on a fear of judicial power, the power to interpret the Constitution. Hence Scalia, Bork et al. search for some unassailable facts, specifically intentions of the framers, which will definitively settle the meaning of crucial constitutional phrases. Scalia, et al. are realists, wanting to understand meaning in terms of intentions of utterers, while Dworkin is an anti-realist, allowing that the Constitution must be understood in changing historical contexts, though constrained by, among other things, the plain meaning of the words in which it is written.
IV.
A NOTE ON RORTY'S PRAGMATIC THEORY OF TRUTH
MERRILL RING
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
Rorty begins his Introduction to the Consequences of Pragmatism by saying that the essays collected therein are "attempts to draw consequences from a pragmatist theory about truth."
Rorty wisely proceeds to say immediately what that theory of truth is upon which the remainder of the book will hang. It is his account of that theory of truth in which I am interested here.
Observe that Rorty does not refer to "the" pragmatist theory of truth. What he offers as the foundation stone of the book is "a" pragmatist theory of truth. One might ask how Rorty's pragmatic theory of truth relates to the various characterizations of truth produced by Peirce, James and Dewey which are also given the label 'pragmatic'. I won't be interested in that line of inquiry here. All that I shall hold Rorty accountable for is producing a theory of truth which fits, even if generously or ingeniously, into some larger philosophical picture that can be said to be pragmatist.
Now for Rorty's account of truth: "This theory says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about."
It is certain that Rorty intends a paradox. 'There is something philosophically interesting to be said about truth, namely that there is nothing philosophically interesting to be said about truth." What, of course, that way of putting the matter reminds us of is the relative nature of being 'philosophically interesting'. More of that later.
Rorty does not restrict himself to the paradoxical formulation of the theory and proceeds to offer a more substantial account. "For pragmatists, 'truth' is just the name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is common to 'Bacon did not write Shakespeare,' 'It rained yesterday,' 'E equals mc2,' 'Love is better than hate,' 'The Allegory of Painting was Vermeer's best work,' '2 plus 2 is 4,' and 'There are nondenumerable infinities.' Pragmatists doubt that there is much to be said about this common feature."
There are two claims embedded in the Pragmatic Theory of Truth (PTT) so conceived: (1) truth is just the name of a property which all true statements share and (2) there is not much to be said about that common feature.
The PTT appears nominalist. That is, it suggests the nominalist account that there is nothing which binds together the members of a group which we classify together other than the fact that we classify them together, presumably acting upon some interest of ours. That nominalism is suggested, I think, both by Rorty's dismissive "truth is just ..." and also by the second claim that there is not much to be said about truth.
However the nominalist appearance is misleading. For although he speaks dismissively Rorty does say that truth is "the name of a property which all true statements share." It is what is common to his set of enumerated truths. And that language is definitely not nominalist, in fact is definitely realist, Platonic in fact. Plato, pursuing Socrates, would have said or assumed precisely that about truth had he written a dialogue in which the central question was 'What is truth?'
Thus, far from having a philosophically uninteresting story to tell about truth, Rorty has enlisted himself, though with a hint of treason, to the Platonic, realist, story about truth. But he is uncomfortable with that kinship (remember also his harassing of Platonism) and attempts to detach himself from such bedfellows and perhaps inch closer to nominalism. That dissociation is the role of the second clause of the theory: that even though 'truth' names a property possessed by all true statements, there is not much of interest to be said about that property. Not, notice, that there is nothing to be said, just: not much. I presume that one thing Rorty means we can't to do is what Socrates hoped to do with common properties, namely spell out a definition of them (e.g. 'knowledge is true justified belief'.) Still, even if that philosophical aim is impossible with respect to truth (and given what we know of Rorty, it may well be impossible on general grounds), it is possible to make a philosophically interesting thesis of that: Rorty on truth is not far from G.E. Moore on the subject of 'good'. Moore said about 'good' that there is no definition of it; rather 'good' is the name of a simple non-natural property whose presence in any given instance must be apprehended by intuition.
Hence in backing away from the Platonism of the first part of the PTT, Rorty does not get too far away at all. He ends up in an intuitionist version of Platonism. He can't be too happy about that.
V.
THE POWER AND GOODNESS OF GOD:
UNDERSTANDING THE EUTHYPHRO DILEMMA
MERRILL RING
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
It had seemed to me that the dilemma about God and goodness derived from the Euthyphro is, and had been for some time, well understood by philosophers. I have discovered evidence recently that that is not so. The chief culprit here is none other than the eminent James Rachels, whose misunderstanding of the argument, at least in The Elements of Moral Philosophy, has influenced others to misrepresent the matter.
The chief misconception is that Rachels and consequently others hold that the dilemma shows that what has been called The Divine Command Theory or, by Rachels, The Theological Conception of the Good is mistaken. However, to think that the dilemma is, or even might be, decisive against Divine Command Theories is a complete misunderstanding of the logic of the matter.
The dilemma in normal form is this: Either something is good (right) because God commands it or God commands something because it is good (right). Having specified that basic disjunction, the consequences of accepting each horn are spelled out. Then the question is asked: which disjunct do you choose as the correct one?
Now the first horn, in the above ordering, represents Divine Command Theories. That is, one who subscribes to a Divine Command Theory holds that what is morally good or morally right is so because God commands it.
However, nothing in the dilemma, in the entire problem field, can logically compel one to reject that alternative (or to accept it either). For what we have on our hands is a dilemma after all: an argumentative structure which says 'Choose' but which does not do the choosing for one. A philosopher, theologian, believer, can, with perfect consistency, accept that the dilemma presents a real problem and yet make the consequent choice, on whatever grounds seem attractive, that the view expressed by the Divine Command Theory about the relation of God and morality is the correct one.
The situation needs to be more precisely characterized, even if some tendentious terms are to be employed. What I shall call 'The naive believer' thinks that she/he can assert two different claims about God: they think that God can be both good and also the ground of morality. The dilemma which has its historical origin in the Euthyphro forces the naive theist to rethink their original position as it shows that one cannot have it both ways. 'The sophisticated believer' accepts the dilemma as genuine and opts for one or the other horn, depending upon very general views of God, morality and the world. 'The overly sophisticated believer' tries to avoid the dilemma by evading it in one way or the other, some wanting to return to the view of the naive believer, others wanting to come to some new conclusion entirely.
That set up, let me now look at the argument presented by Rachels.
(1) Suppose God commands us to do what is right. Then either (a) the right actions are right because he commands them or (b) he commands them because they are right.
(2) If we take option (a), then God's commands are, from a moral point of view, arbitrary; moreover, the doctrine of the goodness of God is rendered meaningless.
(3) If we take option (b), then we have admitted there is a standard of right and wrong that is independent of God's will.
(4) Therefore, we must either regard God's commands as arbitrary, and give up the doctrine of the goodness of God, or admit that there is a standard of right and wrong that is independent of his will, and give up the theological definitions of right and wrong.
(5) From a religious point of view, it is undesirable to regard God's commands as arbitrary or to give up the doctrine of the goodness of God.
(6) Therefore, even from a religious point of view, a standard of right and wrong that is independent of God's will must be accepted.
Before turning to the issue I am really interested in, something needs to be said about Rachels' characterization of the consequences of option (a). The first of those consequences is that "God's commands are, from a moral point of view, arbitrary." Rachels later (in (4) and (5)) describes them as "arbitrary", omitting the qualification "from a moral point of view".
The unqualified 'arbitrary' is surely wrong. God might have a reason for commanding this rather than that and would not then be at all arbitrary. In fact across the range of commands he issues, God might consistently stick to that reason and so morality would be a far from arbitrary set of arrangements.
What God cannot have, on this view of the relationship between God and morality, is a moral reason for commanding something to be a moral requirement. That is, as morality is to be instituted by and dependent upon God's choice of a program, morality comes into being as a result of that choice, is nothing independenly of that choice. However, moral reasons mention morally relevant considerations for choosing or doing something. Hence, if all moral considerations were to come to be by, and rest upon, God's will, there could not be any moral reasons in advance or independently of his choice. Consequently there could be no moral reasons for making the choice of moral principles God made. There may have been reasons for commanding one thing rather than another, but not moral reasons. Thus, if God is to be the foundation, the ground, of morality, then God cannot act morally, cannot act for morally sufficient rasons.
Understanding that consequence of Divine Command Theories, can we say, as Rachels does, that God's choices would be "from a moral point of view, arbitrary"? On Divine Command theories would God be acting in a morally arbitrary way? That criticism presupposes that we have a moral point of view from which we can view God's actions and choices. But Divine Command theories surely deny that there is any such standpoint Hence God's choices would be, if God's will is what morality is founded upon, neither morally artibrary nor morally satisfactory.
Descartes, working within the Augustinian tradition, said of mathematical propositions that God could have created as mathematical truths whatever he wanted. For instance, God might have commanded that 2 plus 2 equals 17. Descartes allows that it is unintelligible to us here and now how 2 plus 2 might have been 17, but given the dependence of all things, including therefore mathematics, upon God's will, God could have done what we find unintelligible. However, Descartes does not say that God's choices of mathematical truths are mathematically arbitrary - rather he assumes that we, in our finitude, go wrong in attempting to comprehend God's mathematical actions and reasons.
So too, for those who want to require the dependence of morality upon God's will, God could have commanded that 50% of all human two year olds be trampled to death on each January 1. It might be morally unintelligible to us how that could have been a moral principle demanded by God. But we simply cannot comprehend God's reasons in our finite state. As our standards of moral assessment cannot be independent of what he has instituted, we cannot critically assess what he could have done or, for that matter, what he did do.
All this commentary amounts to saying that in Rachels premiss (2) the claim that it is a consequence of Divine Command theories that God's actions are arbitrary should be dropped. That is not a legitimate negative consequence of the view. What must remain in that second premiss is Rachels' other comment: that if this disjunct is true, then "the doctrine of the goodness of God is rendered meaningless."
Rachels must be commended for putting the point in that strong fashion. Others traveling in his footsteps have tried to make a weaker claim, saying that if morality is what God commands, then God's goodness is rendered trivial. 'Trivial' is too wimpy a critical term.
To see that observe that to say that anything is morally good is to say that it satisfies the standards of moral goodness. But since God, in his commands, approvals and disapprovals, is instituting standards and not meeting or failing to meet standards, God is beyond good and evil. It is the same with any standard: it cannot be used to judge itself. As Wittgenstein said of the standard meter, it neither is or is not a meter long. Plato, on the other hand, failed to appreviate this point, when he held that the Form of Beauty must be beautiful and similarly for each Form.
On this horn of the dilemma, God is the standard of goodness; therefore, in the strongest terms, it makes no sense to judge his choices by the standard. On this horn, you can say that the claim that God is good is vacuous, empty or, most strongly, makes no sense. What it is not is trivial: for what is trivial is true and 'God is good' here, on the Divine Command Theory, is neither true nor false.
Now, back to the main theme. Step (4) of Rachels' argument should read: Therefore, we must either give up the doctrine of the goodness of God or hold that there is a standard of right and wrong which is independent of God's will. It is my chief contention here that at that point the dilemma which is historically derived from the Euthyphro comes to an end. The choices are mentioned - what remains is up to the believer. What is centrally at fault in Rachels' representation of the dilemma is step (5): "From a religious point of view it is undesirable to give up the doctrine of the goodness of God."
That is not part of the logical issue first raised in the Euthyphro. It is Rachels' own contribution.
Further, the first clause is wildly mistaken. It surely is not true from a religious point of view that option (a) is undesirable. What Rachels is doing is characterizing as the only acceptable religious view, one which finds option (a) to be repugnant and so rejects the Divine Command Theory. But, within Christianity, there have been theologians and religious philosophers who, upon realizing the options, have plumped for option (a). Those who want to emphasize the power of God, upon realizing the conflict within naive Christianity between the asserted power and the asserted goodness of God, surrender the doctrine of God's goodness without thereby ceasing to be believers, without giving up the religious point of view. Roughly, that is the Augustinian tradition. While philosophers such as Socrates, Aquinas, Leibniz and Rachels find such a move incredible, it is nonetheless a genuine religious response to the dilemma which first arose in the Euthyphro. It might even be God's: when God replies to Job's moral complaints all he does is emphasize his power.
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