moral psychology, naturalism

Technically I majored in philosophy, a double major with English. Because the philosophy department was tiny, I graduated one class short of fulfilling that double major -- I had taken most of the classes the department offered, which made it more and more difficult to find a session of any of the remaining classes that didn't conflict with anything else. I'd already been accepted into a Master's program in History, so it didn't make sense to put that off for a year just to take one class, so my Bachelor's is officially only in English. I almost went back to philosophy after that program, when LSU offered me a fellowship in their PhD program, but moved to Indiana instead.

Anyway, for whatever reason I have been less diligent in keeping up with readings in philosophy than I have in history or religious studies -- maybe, unconsciously, because I didn't get that degree, and so think of myself as "less" of a philosophy student than a history one.

Any academic program leaves you with a lot of gaps, but in some disciplines, the gaps are felt more inuitively and obviously than in others -- it's pretty easy to understand, as a historian, where your gaps are, for the simple reason that you're obviously aware of the existence of the many eras and countries about which you have no familiarity. If you took a class on antiquity and a class on the Renaissance, you absorbed a little about the Middle Ages but you have a clear sense that your understanding of European history has a large gap in it. The map of philosophy is a lot less clear. I didn't even have a good sense of what "the philosophy of biology" entailed, for instance, until two degree programs later, when I happened to take a seminar on it.

I don't know that I am necessarily as concerned with my gaps in philosophy as I am in other areas, to be honest, but I am trying to shore my reading and understanding up. At the moment, the book I'm reading in the car is the first volume of a series of essay collections on moral psychology -- the intersection of philosophy (especially ethics) and psychology. The first volume begins with a discussion of the naturalism debate, perhaps the defining debate in ethics in the 20th century.

Interestingly, this was the second context in which I read about philosophical naturalism -- the proposition that there are no supernatural influences in the world -- in the span of a week, and the contexts were very different. In the first, Alvin Plantinga argues in Where the Conflict Really Lies that evolution contradicts the claims of naturalism. Plantinga is one of the most important theologians of the last century, but in attempting to counter the idiocies of the New Atheism, he goes too far -- it's this train of thought that led him to support intellectual design for a while, and when you're in the room with those guys, you really have to take a long look at your life.

The surface meaning of philosophical naturalism -- "there is no supernatural world" -- is the least interesting part of it to talk about. In ethics, the naturalism debate is concerned more specifically with the question of whether moral philosophy, normative philosophy, whatever you want to call it -- a philosophical framework that defines what is right and what is wrong -- needs to be grounded in an understanding of human behavior and the natural world, and/or whether it is possible to have a system of ethics that does not depend on the existence of God. That may sound like two questions, but your answer to one tends to dictate your answer to the other.

This may seem like a non-issue to laymen, but they would probably differ considerably on what the "obvious" answer is. The fact is that philosophers have tended to agree with Kant's insistence that an ethical framework has to postulate the existence of God. People who agree with that further tend to think that it's fine to talk about what's right and wrong without concern for how humans are built -- they're the ones who are the quickest to attack "relativism," or to paint as relativist any ethical reasoning that invokes the findings of social sciences. Philosophers and scientists alike are surprisingly uncomfortable with the idea that ethics should be informed by an understanding of human behavior and biology -- far more than you would think given the horseshit narratives we're always fed about godless science.

Now, me, I've already said that I condemn the use of the afterlife as a behavioral incentive, so it's not surprising that I find the idea that "there can be no ethics without God" abhorrent. More importantly, I don't think that belief in God requires -- or even easily leads to -- the belief that ethics can be considered only in a vacuum without reference to human realities. There are a lot of aspects of the naturalism debate that involve too much nit-picking and hair-splitting for me to be interested in, so maybe it's good I didn't take that fellowship; I am kind of a utilitarian about philosophy, I quickly lose interest in the questions whose answers have no impact on behavior. 

Though philosophers, thankfully, don't do this, the whole kerfuffle reminds me of some of the worst idiotic things that Christians say -- it's always Christians in my experience, but perhaps in countries with different religious demographics, other denominations are just as guilty: 

"If you don't believe in God, how do you know right from wrong?"

"If you don't believe in God, how does your life have any purpose?"

They're roughly the same question, at least from these dips. And it's always, always from Christians who know very little about their own religion, have thought very little about Christian ethics, and certainly don't have any real answers -- answers that have actually changed what they do in life -- to the "purpose" question. Fuckwits all. These questions are just signals that tell you what the asker is deriving from their religious identity -- a sense of superiority and security, a sense of settledness.