I am presenting this at Steubenville’s Must Morality Be
Grounded in God? Conference. This is still very much a work in progress.
Consider what I call the Argument
from Moral Experience:
(1)
Moral facts are experienced as being objective and non-natural.
(2) The
best explanation of there being objective and non-natural moral facts is based
on phenomenological theism.
(3)
Phenomenological theism is the thesis that God is immanently revealed in moral
action.
(4)
Therefore, the experience of moral facts provides evidence for thinking theism
is true.
In the following lecture, I would like to assess the
argument from moral experience. My argument from moral experience is inspired
by a rendition of the typical Moral Argument
for God’s Existence:
(1’)
Moral facts are objective and non-natural.
(2’)
The best explanation of there being objective and non-natural moral facts is
theism.
(3’)
Therefore, the experience of moral facts provides evidence for thinking theism
is true.
The difference between these two arguments
is based on shifting the inference from the existence of God to the experience
of God. For the experience of God is immanent in moral action, and what we want
from morality can only acquire a sense and meaning from looking at the
structure of moral experience where God is felt. I will admit that part of this
analysis is inspired both by Scheler and Levinas, but my real ambition is to
get at the heart of the arguments as to why we might think Scheler and Levinas
correct in these matters. Let me speak to the organization of this essay.
First, I will explain the grounds for holding each premise,
and why I find it far superior to the Moral Argument for God’s Existence. Next,
I will offer phenomenological reasons why the conclusion follows from the
premises. In the Argument from Moral Experience, this will involve an in depth
analysis of premise (2), which is doing most of the work of the aforementioned
argument. Second, I will explain the motivations for why I focused on the
phenomenology of moral experience as a reason for concluding theism is true.
(1) could have been stated
different, such as “ (1’) Moral facts exist as objective and non-natural.” The
assertion of extant moral facts is harder to prove than the experience of moral
facts. The hard moral realist asserts the existence of an independently true
body of moral statements, which are true and treated very much the same way as
one might treat the belief that “Cats are mammals.” We treat the moral belief
that “People should be fair to each other” as suggesting something true for all
situations to which people would relate to each other. The reason why the hard
moral realist finds moral claims convincing is that they can oblige us from the
simple fact that they are true.
(1’) however proves too much. First, the hard moral realist
is metaphysically extravagant. He wants objectivity so much that he treats
moral claims like scientific claims. However, the truth conditions for such
objectivity distort how we experience values. First, we do not experience
values as an object of knowledge. They are felt deeply in intentional feeling.
Second, we do not assent to a proposition like a controlled scientific inquiry.
Instead, values are felt in exigent situations about the goods in question.
Moreover, the last two experiential reasons are motivations for why someone
might insist upon the truth of hard moral realism, but without a careful
phenomenological analysis of experience, the hard moral realist often is
self-serving in those features of experience he selects about experience that
motivates endorsing his extravagant metaethical position.
Let us look, then, at some features
of moral experience more carefully. If both you and I share a similar feeling,
we can intend the same value. Let us
use the oft-repeated example that you and I stand some distance from a group of
teenagers setting a cat on fire. There is nothing physical in that situation to
which we normally assign value, and yet we employ value-talk about the
situation. At this point, we are safe to assume that we experience the cat
burning as unnecessary suffering, and this action bears the value cruelty
beyond belief. If we asked the teenagers why they did it, we might try to find
some abuse in their background or some underlying motivation for why they set
the cat on fire, but looking for motivation of someone is different than the
felt-demand of value in that situation. We experience the wrongness of that
suffering deeply. From the experience, we begin to see that we have some
language to talk about how both you and I felt about that act. To see if we
have the same moral hunches and reactions, we talk to others that react
predictably similar to the same situation. Setting cats on fire is felt as cruel. From this common co-feeling
about the situation, we can conclude that there is some reliable objectivity in
how I and others feel and that nothing physical in that situation could account
for the feeling of cruelty manifest in our acts.
In (2), the phenomenology is the
explanation. Usually, metaethical positions import the assumptions about
reality as why we experience the world as we do, but phenomenological
description reverses this priority and looks to describe an experience of an
exemplar phenomenon before inferring ontological commitments. One might object
that this makes phenomenology, then, self-serving for what it wants from
ontology. However, I concede some of this without admitting the self-serving
nature of phenomenological method. Presupposing metaethical commitments about
moral experience before looking to experience itself is worse than looking to experience as a way to solve philosophical
problems. For the phenomenologist, taking experience for granted means removing
philosophy from the concerns of those that live it. In such distancing,
metaphysics can be employed to assert categories about experience that are not
found within experience at all, and such attempts could presuppose an ontology
about particular values. One motivation shared amongst phenomenologists is the want
for philosophy to concern itself with concrete matters of lived experience
rather than proposing any conceptualization removed from experience.
In moral experience, we experience
values as being on the backs of goods, deeds and persons. We feel these values
between us despite their lack of physical tangibility. We re-feel what someone
else feels and in that feeling, we are presented with value’s givenness.
Intentional feeling is correlated to a specific value-quality. Bliss fills our
whole personality with the Absolute value of the Holy. Our feeling of health is
connected to how our environment is given to us. In the highest value of the
Holy, our capacity to feel alongside others is renewed in the highest possible
way. We are instilled with a perspective completely outside of us that comes
unto us in ritual and religious experience more generally. Thus, when premise
(2) predicates “objective” and “non-natural” features of morality, these
qualities are aspects of experiencing intentional-feeling associated within
religion. God is the source to which we aim, and in aiming to that which is
completely Other we become oriented towards that which is pure difference in
our very action. We can easily welcome both widow and orphan to be fed by
having a renewed connection to Christ in the Eucharist. The singular unique
otherness of the other/person finds expression in both Levinas and Scheler. The
person is given to us as a possibility within the immanence of the suffering Other.
“Objective” here means “intersubjective” and is due to our capacity to re-feel
what others feel that binds us to others and the emanating presence where God
is felt. Before God, we are all unique. In relation to Him, I am Ed, a Ph.D.
graduate from SIU, born in New Jersey and raised in Western Pennsylvania. My
wife is Ashley, born in Youngstown Ohio and thankfully a Steelers fan. There is
nobody like her or me in existence. That’s the point. The objectivity takes on
a new sense within phenomenology. The objectivity in other moral philosophies
amounts to a substitutable other. Before Kantianism, we are all agents. Either you
or I ought to do the same thing in relation to the categorical imperative. Both
the non-formal ethics of Levinas and Scheler attempt to supplant this modernist
tendency of equalizing differences between people and insist upon the radical
unique otherness of the “person.” Ashley is not valuable due to species
membership, the fact that she is a rational agent or any other criterion beyond
herself. Instead, Ashley is absolutely unique, and it follows from her radical
uniqueness objectively that she is absolutely valuable. In fact, the
possibility to love another rests on accepting the singular uniqueness an-other
person.
Second, “non-natural” follows on the
heel of the singular uniqueness of persons. On this point, phenomenological
evidence is rather convincing. The fact that a person can never be objectified
or reduced to another category is what it means to be a person. Instead,
persons are of spirit. We cannot be
adequately categorized since we are beyond categorization and simultaneously we
are the source of that categorization. Persons are the source of meaning in the
world, and consequently, they cannot be derived from that which they engender.
Persons are not reducible to anything in the world. If intentional feeling
precedes all pre-volitional and pre-cognitive experience, then it is only from
the shared intentional capacity of persons that is responsible for why
experienced objects in life have meaning (and therefore value). Scheler’s later
metaphysics aims to articulate a view beyond the phenomenological but
preserving the insight of the person’s non-objectifiable spirit and at the same
time how persons and God participate in being together.
According to Scheler, the person encounters a world in its
vital urge. The vital urge reaches outward towards a goal in the world, and the
world is given to us in resistance. The vital urge is rarely satisfied and if
it attains its goal and the world conforms in some way to us, the world will
comply ever so briefly. Then, life will be given to us in this worldly
resistance once more, and we will not be sated. Within this movement, the
coming-to-be feltness of the resisting world is called value. In this way,
values are at the spiritual act-center of the person reaching out and filling
the content of our experience of actions, things and others. When we relate to another,
when we help another person, they – like us – encounter a life in which our
drives, energy and desire find resistance in the world around us. All reality
is given in resistance but capable of ever higher spiritualization. While
spirit is initially impotent to physically affect the world, we can experience
a calling within our vital-urges and learn to suspend their effect on us. Thus,
by suspending our attention to the vital-urge’s movement to a resisting world
and thereby suffering, human beings can apprehend a higher value than simply
their vital-urges. This happens when we act on love and within acting in love,
God stands between us and others, or what is meant in premise (3). We can
aspire to the level of spiritual feeling and values of Holiness. Thus, again
the point of religion is to open ourselves up towards the inherent
spiritualization in human life and realize it in all we do.
The point of phenomenological theism is not to replace the
sense of God has in His own right. Instead, accepting “(2’) The best
explanation of there being objective and non-natural moral facts is theism”
commits one to adopt the same phenomenological reasons inherent in the
Schelerian commitments I have explained here. Typically, an objective value is
one that can be demonstrated publically according to norms and justifications.
There are many possible ways we might do this. We might show that the consequences
in one outcome maximize better than in another outcome. We might show that one
course of action is more rational than another. However, the point matters not
how we justify a course of action. Instead, these approaches presuppose the
very phenomenology of experience underlying my motivation for emphasizing the
phenomenological insight over (2’). The utilitarian assumes value is already
knowable and that there is something like an impartial perspective to which
various outcomes can be assessed. The impartial standpoint in this secularly
committed approach relies upon an experience of thinking objectivity and
non-naturalism true. Values stand between people with respect to feeling; they
are irreducibly part of another’s experience, and yet we act upon them because
in participating in value the manifest benefit grows out of the presence of
that action. More secular theories might call this elevation of goodness in the
world acts of beneficence. In such a way, the intersubjectivity of what these
people take to be “objective” and valuable is wholly realized in action between
them and what becomes realized is a commitment to love the other. This love
manifests insofar as the utilitarian is more sophisticated in what she seeks to
maximize beyond mere hedonic calculation, but let’s leave this alone for now. As
long as the moral philosophy in question seeks to realize values through
action, there is something like a growth, a becoming, a presence of beneficence
underlying the affection such action brings. This is the experience in question
that is shared between secular and sacred approaches to values.
The growth and becoming of love
suspends the descending effect drives have upon us whereas love participates in
the intersubjective spirit of persons. For Scheler, persons can only be those
that can suspend the effect of drives upon us and reflectively bring into
awareness the act of suspending drives. Thus, persons and God are capable of
this, but when love takes on the highest value of the Holy, individuals become
given as absolutely other. There is no higher value than the absolute value of
the Holy. In this way, the intersubjective constitution of community can be
based upon a commitment to the Holy in the immanence of our firsthand
experience of Others. In our case, this commitment is the directedness of my
intentional act loves the other person as they are without imposing upon them
any objectification. Hence, objectification cannot be a source of making the
other a victim or reason for justifying abuse. Since spirit is pure
non-objectifiability, I can only leave the other be as a unique other before
God. In this way we can see the role of premise (3). The immanence of the
singular otherness comes by encountering them as each person is, singular and
unique. In the 20th century, the massive abuses of genocide arise
out of the tendency for governments and people to judge others through
objectified categories. A Jew can be less than human, so can Blacks in the
American South. The point is rather striking. By acknowledging God as a source
of immanent otherness underlying the otherness of people I encounter in life, I
adopt a philosophy incapable of re-presenting the singular uniqueness of
an-other. Instead, through God, we start with the recognition of singular
uniqueness and preserve the commitment to the non-objectifiability of human
beings first and foremost before all other commitments in philosophy. This
prohibition of objectification delimits the possibility of a metaphysics of
human beings at all.
Finally, “the experience of moral
facts” establishes a deduced relation to “thinking theism true.” I am
suspicious of metaphysics. Like Levinas, I want to supplant the tendency of
Western thinking to avoid “the logic of the same” or what Scheler repeatedly
calls “objectification.” The practical consequences of the 20th
century’s abuses have all subordinated the radical otherness of the person to
some category that dehumanizes. In fact, we might read this subordination of
the person to categories of metaphysical speculation in the tendency of
modernity to de-personalize the person. Instead, the first philosophy is not
metaphysics, but the ontology of the person. There is only one being that is
wholly other than I can re-present Him/It, and this is God. As Jean Valjean
sings towards the end of Le Miserable:
“To love the other person is to see the face of God.” In Schelerian speak, this
realization is the recognized givenness of the person within the experience of
their very uniqueness—what he calls “spirit.”
Of course, I broadened this insight, and claimed that “the
experience of moral facts” confirms “thinking theism true.” A moral fact could
be the recognition of a proposition that expresses that I owe others charity
when I can manage it at no cost to myself. Moral facts are propositionalized
positive and negative expressions of what I owe others. In our moral
imagination, we often imagine what it might mean to fulfill some mysterious
action and sometimes we want to universalize all others like the imagined other
and the imagined action as a basis for how others would act given the same set
of conditions. Yet, such an approach is dedicated to the objectification if the
intention may have been seeking out only what I ought to do in that situation.
I do not regard the others as anything other than those that again can be
substituted for another.