Upcoming book review…

Com­pared to most, I’m writ­ing a rather late review of John Lof­tus’ The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion; to be fair to myself, I’ve only recently acquired the book, thanks to Prometheus and Ed Babin­ski (author of chap­ter 5, The Cos­mol­ogy of the Bible). I believe I’ll review each sec­tion of the book, as there are already many chap­ter by chap­ter ‘reviews’ (such as the well known The Infi­del Delu­sion) and I’d rather not write a sin­gle post, many thou­sand word review.

Yes, I think that will be my task over the next two weeks, which means that tomor­row or Mon­day should see a review of the first sec­tion… Which I was not par­tic­u­lar impressed with.

On a slightly unre­lated note — back to school soon. As I’ve moved I’m con­tin­u­ing my courses through my school’s dis­tance edu­ca­tion pro­gram. I’ve called them 5 times already about my change of address, yet they per­sist in send­ing my course mate­ri­als to my old res­i­dence. Hope­fully it’s fixed this time…

Could I be Wrong?

The fol­low­ing is a fun (well, at least I had fun writ­ing it) dia­logue I wrote ear­lier today on one of the forums I’ve recently stopped reg­u­larly fre­quent­ing. It con­cerns the ques­tion ‘are you will­ing to admit you might be wrong?’ The dia­logue was writ­ten in reply to some­one who dis­agreed with me (did not think such an admis­sion should be made).

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Char­ac­ters: Socrates, Glau­con
Set­ting: After speak­ing with Euthy­phro, Socrates is stopped by the Sophist Glau­con, a first year phi­los­o­phy stu­dent who thinks he’s learned it all. Glau­con has heard the accu­sa­tion that Socrates is cor­rupt­ing the youth, teach­ing the young about ‘the God’ and deny­ing the gods of the poets. Glau­con pro­ceeds to exam­ine to Socrates.

Glau­con: Socrates, much has been said of your new god — tell me, how did you come by him? Fancy or intoxication?

Socrates: Exam­i­na­tion, of course — “fol­low­ing the argu­ment wher­ever it leads”, as my stu­dent Plato likes to say. It took many years, as you can see I am now quite old.

Glau­con: Indeed, I can. And I sup­pose I should have known; the wis­dom of Socrates always exam­ines. It would appear you still have time before the coun­cil charges you, a question?

Socrates: Cer­tainly. I would not be Socrates if I declined.

Glau­con: Very well — is it pos­si­ble you could be wrong?

Socrates: Quite so — I arrived at my belief through exam­i­na­tion. This involves a reliance on the senses, which can be faulty. It was at first ques­tions like the Euthy­phro, which had shown me the deficit of the poets gods, then it was the ora­cle her­self. There are many reasons.

Glau­con: The ora­cle, you say — per­haps a defect in your psy­chol­ogy? The Euthy­phro, an error in logic?

Socrates: Yes, per­haps so.

Glau­con: Then why should you teach? Sit still and alone, rather than engage in this fool­ish which denies the gods!

Socrates: I can­not — I am con­cerned with the truth, even if that means look­ing the fool (which I am), and deny­ing the gods (which I do). The poets tell sto­ries which ignite the imag­in­ings of man, but that does not make them true. In any case, shall we exam­ine your charge, that because I acknowl­edge I may be wrong, I have no right to teach?

Glau­con: As you say, you would not be Socrates if you did not. Proceed.

Socrates: There is a glar­ing hole in your procla­ma­tion, young Glau­con, you have assumed I have no good rea­sons for believ­ing, and against this have com­pared my acknowl­edg­ment that I ‘may be wrong’. In such a way, you have tried to show me a fool, of believ­ing with­out cause. Per­haps, you say, my logic is faulty, or I have gone mad if it is not. Maybe this is all a farce, I wear a mask with my head in the clouds. Tell me, Glau­con, do you know of the rea­sons why I believe?

Glau­con: No, it’s of no con­cern to me. You have admit­ted you may be wrong.

Socrates: It is of great con­cern to you, for you do not real­ize how ridicu­lous a ques­tion you’re asking.

Glau­con: Very well then. Why do you believe, Socrates?

Socrates: First, I have rejected the gods because they con­tra­dict. There is no jus­tice between them. What Cronos declared as just, Zeus declared as unjust. What Hera believes about Achilles, Ares believes about Hek­tor. The Euthy­phro has shown this much. If these exist, they are not gods though they may be pow­er­ful and still yet shape the lives of men. If they do not exist, it does not mat­ter. Sec­ondly, I have embraced the God because of the ora­cle at del­phi, who after all this was not who I first believed. There is a prod­ding, an indi­ca­tion of when I should talk and what I should say, and now, what I should believe. This wise god has, as it were, acco­mo­dated me. I could not deny my own expe­ri­ence, not after years of exam­i­na­tion have shown it to be true. I read also the wis­dom of Saul, of that South­ern king­dom. Of course, it would be fool­ish to believe in no god — look around you! The ques­tion is only, which god is the true god? And this I believe I found. There are oth­ers with stronger rea­sons than I — like the Hebrews, who claim to have expe­ri­enced God in body and in sight. But unless you wish to be an itiner­int skep­tic, focused on pieces of doubt when whole pic­tures of rea­son are given, then I can­not con­vince you.

Glau­con: All well and good, but why is my ques­tion ridiculous?

Socrates: Because of what you’ve com­pared: some­thing with noth­ing. You did not ask me why I believed, and yet you pro­ceeded to assume that I must be mis­taken because I admit­ted I could be wrong. Your ques­tion is ridicu­lous if you com­pare my rea­sons for belief, and my rea­sons for admit­ting I could be mis­taken. I admit the lat­ter only out of intel­lec­tual hon­esty. Per­haps the God I believe in is not the God I think he is — much like when I first believed the ora­cle of del­phi. The for­mer rea­sons for believ­ing are many: rea­son, logic, exam­i­na­tion, wis­dom lit­er­a­ture, nature, form, tes­ti­mony of oth­ers, etc. If I told you I had seen my God, would your ques­tion still hold its force? I would be answer­ing you hon­estly because I will always exam­ine that which is brought up to me. But this no more makes your ques­tion any more seri­ous, or coherent.

Glau­con: I sup­pose not… But as you’ve admit­ted you could be wrong, I see noth­ing that changes this fact.

Socrates: Then you are blind. Let me ask you — could you be wrong?

Glau­con: I really must be going Socrates.

Do I Believe in Divine Protection?

John Lof­tus asks:

Really, do you? Then why is it that God’s divine pro­tec­tion is indis­tin­guish­able from chance? And why do you act as if there is none? (http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/08/christian-do-you-really-believe-in.html)

Yep, I do.

But here’s a good ques­tion: what is chance? One of the def­i­n­i­tions pro­vided by Merriam-Webster is,“the assumed imper­sonal pur­pose­less deter­miner of unac­count­able hap­pen­ings”. Their other def­i­n­i­tion (which I like much bet­ter) is: “some­thing that hap­pens unpre­dictably with­out dis­cernible human inten­tion or observ­able cause”. As an exam­ple; if I throw a piece of dice into the air, we might ask, ‘what are the chances of it land­ing on six’? (1/6th) Aside from per­form­ing some basic cal­cu­la­tions on how many sides to a die there are, we really couldn’t say (I might throw a die as many times as needed, and still not role a six). The ‘chance’ involves how the dice is thrown, how far it’s thrown, how it rotates, wind resis­tance, how it falls, on what angle is strikes a sur­face, how it bounces, the weight of the dice (includ­ing the ink), etc. It seems to me that chance, in this instance, is an umbrella term for a num­ber of fac­tors that we’re aware of — there may be other fac­tors we aren’t aware of — but have no way of faith­fully and / or accu­rately cal­cu­lat­ing. The rea­son I like the sec­ond def­i­n­i­tion over the first is that chance isn’t a thing-in-itself — there is no such thing as an ‘imper­sonal pur­pose­less deter­miner of unac­count­able hap­pen­ings’. Espe­cially if we’re assum­ing a mate­ri­al­is­tic frame­work; there are only phys­i­cal causes.

The charge then appears to be: because we can­not deter­mine a pat­tern or rea­son to divine pro­tec­tion, it is there­fore indis­tin­guish­able from chance, and there­fore we should not believe in it (because there are not good rea­sons for believ­ing in God, and other such things). Another good ques­tion would be: if we assume God exists, and He is vastly beyond our com­pre­hen­sion, how would we be able to deter­mine when divine pro­tec­tion occurs? For instance, is an act of divine pro­tec­tion a dis­tinct and obvi­ous event, or can it be (or is it) hid­den in nat­ural events? Fur­ther­more, does a lack of divine pro­tec­tion indi­cate it does not hap­pen? I don’t think so.

Unless there were some way to dis­tin­guish between divine pro­tec­tion, and ‘chance’, then this seems to me the wrong ques­tion to ask. Not that it’s phrased all that fairly. Per­haps we should con­sider an exam­ple of divine pro­tec­tion in the Bible (an exam­ple taken from my father-in-laws ser­mon, this past Sunday):

Daniel 3:8–18

8For this rea­son at that time cer­tain Chaldeans came for­ward and brought charges against the Jews.

9They responded and said to Neb­uchad­nez­zar the king: “O king, live for­ever!

10You, O king, have made a decree that every man who hears the sound of the horn, flute, lyre, trigon, psaltery, and bag­pipe and all kinds of music, is to fall down and wor­ship the golden image.

11But who­ever does not fall down and wor­ship shall be cast into the midst of a fur­nace of blaz­ing fire.

12There are cer­tain Jews whom you have appointed over the admin­is­tra­tion of the province of Baby­lon, namely Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego. These men, O king, have dis­re­garded you; they do not serve your gods or wor­ship the golden image which you have set up.”

13Then Neb­uchad­nez­zar in rage and anger gave orders to bring Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego; then these men were brought before the king.

14Neb­uchad­nez­zar responded and said to them, “Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, that you do not serve my gods or wor­ship the golden image that I have set up?

15Now if you are ready, at the moment you hear the sound of the horn, flute, lyre, trigon, psaltery and bag­pipe and all kinds of music, to fall down and wor­ship the image that I have made, very well But if you do not wor­ship, you will imme­di­ately be cast into the midst of a fur­nace of blaz­ing fire; and what god is there who can deliver you out of my hands?

16Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego replied to the king, “O Neb­uchad­nez­zar, we do not need to give you an answer con­cern­ing this mat­ter.

17If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the fur­nace of blaz­ing fire; and He will deliver us out of your hand, O king.

18But even if He does not, (W)let it be known to you, O king, that we are not going to serve your gods or wor­ship the golden image that you have set up.”

We may rea­son­ably assume that acts of divine pro­tec­tion align with God’s divine will, that makes it a mys­te­ri­ous thing. Some good questions.

Brief thought: why I still have faith

My father-in-law asked me a cou­ple days ago how my faith has with­stood my read­ing so many anti-Christian and ‘skep­ti­cal’ books in gen­eral. I plan to write a fur­ther post (or per­haps series?) to more broadly answer the ques­tion, but I think the most ‘basic’ answer to the ques­tion is that I read old books. Greek dia­logues — espe­cially the Socratic kind — have caused me to be weary of any­one who (1) speaks in uni­ver­sals by employ­ing broad and ambigu­ous terms and / or who (2) declares to have put forth the ‘ulti­mate argu­ment’, whether cumu­la­tive or oth­er­wise, against broad and ambigu­ous terms such as ‘faith,’ ‘Chris­tian­ity’ (espe­cially when Evan­gel­i­cal­ism specif­i­cally, or fun­da­men­tal­ism specif­i­cally, are the tar­get), ‘the­ism’, etc. who fail to define these terms and then pro­ceed to super­fi­cially com­pare and con­trast Chris­tian­ity, Judaism, Islam, Hin­duism, Bud­dhism, etc. in the hopes of caus­ing some sort of ‘death by a thou­sand qual­i­fi­ca­tions’ with­out pro­vid­ing any real argu­ment in sup­port of their position.

I guess what I’m say­ing is that the ‘New Athe­ism’, at least, is a whole lot of sen­sa­tion­al­ism, with sub­stance very appar­ently lack­ing. At least from my read­ing of it.

Evangelicals reading to learn?!

Edit* Thom Stark has writ­ten a post clar­i­fy­ing his posi­tion on John Lof­tus’ post, as well as his own motives, which you can find at his site http://thomstark.net/?p=1580. Stark clar­i­fies him­self as follows:

With that said, THAT IS NOT TRUE OF ALL EVANGELICALS. The term “evan­gel­i­cal” encom­passes a wide vari­ety of Chris­tians, and many evan­gel­i­cals are not guilty of the accu­sa­tions Lof­tus has brought against them. I think he knows this too, but he likes the polemics, and that’s fine with me. I’m not writ­ing to con­demn what he’s said, but just to clar­ify what I say.

I have no inter­est in con­vert­ing peo­ple away from their brand of evan­gel­i­cal­ism. I oppose fun­da­men­tal­ism, and I make crit­i­cisms of the doc­trine of bib­li­cal inerrancy, but I do not oppose faith. I wrote my book to try to help Chris­tians who are strug­gling with the Bible and with fun­da­men­tal­ism to fig­ure out a way to be Chris­t­ian with­out com­pro­mis­ing their strug­gle or aban­don­ing the faith altogether.

I know plenty of evan­gel­i­cals who read very widely, and plenty who are very sym­pa­thetic to many of the argu­ments made by crit­ics of evan­gel­i­cal­ism. My book is not an attack on Chris­tian­ity, but on a spe­cific brand of fun­da­men­tal­ist evan­gel­i­cal­ism that I do not believe can be sus­tained after an hon­est look at the data. That said, I am not call­ing those who dis­agree with me “dis­hon­est.” I am merely say­ing that the only hon­est con­clu­sion I could come to was to reject that brand of fun­da­men­tal­ist evangelicalism.

I cer­tainly hope no one read­ing this post or Lof­tus’ has come away think­ing Stark agrees with what Lof­tus has said (I don’t believe this is appar­ent in Lof­tus’ post, nor did I say such in mine). My only aim here was to crit­i­cize Lof­tus and his polemics, and pro­vide an short rea­son (with exam­ple) of why I don’t give equal weight to all writ­ers. It was not to group Stark together with Lof­tus. It seems to me a bit of a shame that Lof­tus has pro­moted Stark’s book but has also included the thought that fol­lows, and that I crit­i­cize. Hope­fully it does not unfairly impli­cate Stark as agree­ing wholly with Loftus.

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John Lof­tus said:

“The only rea­son evan­gel­i­cals still exist is because most of them sim­ply do not read. Those who do read don’t read works like his. The few who do read works like his don’t do so to learn anything”

‘Works like his’ refers to the yet-to-be-released book by Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God: What Scrip­ture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong. Ignor­ing the specifics of the book, this com­ment by Lof­tus is one of the rea­sons why I sim­ply can’t take peo­ple — such as John Lof­tus — as seri­ously as they would per­haps like, or want. I won­der what it would look like if John Lof­tus were writ­ing a survey:

1. Are you an evan­gel­i­cal who reads?

If no, stop — you’re a nor­mal evan­gel­i­cal. If yes, con­tinue to step two.

2. Are you an evan­gel­i­cal who reads skep­ti­cal books.

If no, stop — you’re a nor­mal evan­gel­i­cal. If yes, con­tinue to step three.

3. Are you an evan­gel­i­cal who reads skep­ti­cal books to learn from them?

If no, stop — you’re a nor­mal evan­gel­i­cal. If yes, you don’t exist or are lying / deluded.

There may exist after-all evan­gel­i­cals who (1) read, (2) read skep­ti­cal books and (3) read skep­ti­cal books to learn from them (i.e. me). But per­haps Lof­tus means some­thing like the fol­low­ing when he says ‘the few who do read works like his don’t do so to learn any­thing’: if an hon­est evan­gel­i­cal read a book, such as Thom Stark’s, to learn, he would as a result become con­vinced of the ille­git­i­macy of his belief. If, how­ever, said “hon­est” evan­gel­i­cal does not become con­vinced as a result of read­ing Stark’s book, then our evan­gel­i­cal is nei­ther (1) hon­est or (2) inter­ested in learn­ing. The expec­ta­tion seems to be that the end-result of ‘learn­ing’ (in this respect) is the rejec­tion of faith. If one does not reject their faith, they have not learned — there­fore, they aren’t inter­ested in learn­ing. I don’t see any rea­son to accept this line of thought. This hid­den premise should be rejected: not all those who read books writ­ten by skep­tics, and do so hon­estly, become them­selves skep­tics. Insist­ing that there is some rea­son — all of which involve intel­lec­tual dis­hon­esty, as far as I can tell — why such peo­ple aren’t con­vinced into reject­ing ‘the faith’ is sim­ply an unwill­ing­ness to deal with the data. It’s a denial of the ‘fact of the matter’.

The ques­tion, then, is where does that leave some­one like me, the sort of per­son Lof­tus has aimed his sights at? Would he acknowl­edge that there are some evan­gel­i­cals who read (skep­tics) to learn, or would he insist on his orig­i­nal thought? Either way, this sort of think­ing (i.e. polemics) acts only as insu­la­tion, and isn’t con­ducive to hon­est discussion.

Camping…

With the in-laws for the next cou­ple of days, be back Monday.

One for the Many

Exam­i­na­tion is again the source of a change of views, in this case, how I imag­ine God oper­ates. In think­ing about the sort of moral dilemma that pits a loved one against many strangers (e.g. such as sac­ri­fic­ing a son, for a train­load of strangers), I’ve always imag­ined that God would be of the opin­ion of sac­ri­fic­ing the least amount of peo­ple for the greater good of the most amount of peo­ple, i.e. God ‘sac­ri­ficed’ Jesus, the one for the many. But that isn’t right — God sac­ri­ficed Him­self, or at least the third per­son of the Trin­ity who became incar­nate sac­ri­ficed Him­self (but that is the same thing, is it not? Such con­fu­sion with this divine mys­tery of the Trin­ity). I sup­pose there is also all that talk of the shep­herd going back for the lost sheep, etc. Though sep­a­rate from this, it still seems best to me that the least amount of loss for the ‘great­est good’ is still the prefer­able choice, no mat­ter its difficulty.

Book Review: Doubting

DoubtingPages: 151
Pub­lisher: Inter­Var­sity Press
Year: 2006
Author: Alis­ter McGrath

This was a nice short book (in fact, an enjoy­able break from Alas­dair MacIntyre’s After Virtue) on a topic I haven’t heard many peo­ple address, doubt. McGrath writes as if some­one strug­gling with doubt — who else but these and the curi­ous would be read­ing? — is read­ing, and as a result the tone of the book is very uplifting.

The book pro­gresses log­i­cally and in an ordered fash­ion; begin­ning with a proper under­stand­ing of what doubt is and isn’t (e.g. tak­ing into account the role doubt plays in the bible), illus­trat­ing how doubt is inher­ent to all belief sys­tems, includ­ing athe­ism, and then address­ing the dif­fer­ent areas where one may expe­ri­ence doubt: the gospel (ch. 6), one­self (ch.7), Jesus Christ (ch.8), and God (ch.9). McGrath con­cludes by address­ing how to put doubt into per­spec­tive, thereby allow­ing us to bet­ter han­dle it.

Admit­tedly, this isn’t the deep­est book writ­ten on doubt, but it doesn’t need to be. McGrath seems to aim only at assur­ing the reader that doubt is a nor­mal part of faith, rather than answer­ing any num­ber of the plethora of ille­git­i­mate and legit­i­mate objec­tions raised against Chris­t­ian the­ism. In the course of Doubt­ing he sug­gests (on page 121) that doubt may even be a sign of a neglected faith; some­thing I hadn’t thought of before, and a very inter­est­ing thought to boot.

This is a short review for a nice short book, and if you’re strug­gling with doubt you might give this book a read to gain a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the role of doubt in the life of faith (but be aware of what I said above, McGrath does not seek to answer spe­cific objec­tions to Chris­t­ian theism).

A Quick Thought on Euthyphro

Socrates’ younger friend, Euthy­phro, has under­taken pros­e­cu­tion of his father for mur­der­ing a slave (or so Euthy­phro says); that is, his father bound and tied a field laborer who, in a fit of drunken rage, killed a domes­tic ser­vant. In this con­di­tion the field laborer was thrown into a ditch until word could be fetched from an Athen­ian diviner as to how to han­dle the laborer. While wait­ing for word, the slave died. It is with this back­ground that the well-known Euthy­phro has been formulated:

Socrates: Then, my friend, I remark with sur­prise that you have not answered the ques­tion which I have asked. For I cer­tainly did not ask you to tell me what action is both pious and impi­ous: but now it would seem that what is loved by the gods is also hated by them. And there­fore, Euthy­phro, in thus chastis­ing your father you may very likely be doing what is agree­able to Zeus but dis­agree­able to Cronos or Uranus, and what is accept­able to Hep­haes­tus but unac­cept­able to Hera, and there may be other gods who have sim­i­lar dif­fer­ences of opinion.

Socrates: We shall know bet­ter, my good friend, in a lit­tle while. The point which I should first wish to under­stand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved by the gods.1

I’ve never been entirely con­vinced that the ‘Euthy­phro dilemma’ is a rel­e­vant cri­tique of the sort of the­is­tic belief one finds in Judaism, Chris­tian­ity or Islam. The Greek pan­theon of gods is another story, and it is here that the Euthy­phro shines, as Socrates aptly illus­trates in the first quote. For there is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between the Greek pan­theon, and monothe­is­tic belief — many (Greek gods) as com­pared with the few, or the one (Judaism, Chris­tian­ity, Islam). It is a com­mon reply — and I believe the cor­rect one — to the Euthy­phro to say that good­ness is grounded in the char­ac­ter of God, so that there is a third alter­na­tive to the (now) false dichotomy Plato presents through Socrates. This answer, how­ever, would not have been avail­able to the Athen­ian mind.With respect to con­flict­ing myths about the gods within a cul­ture, the Euthy­phro dilemma raises an extremely seri­ous objec­tion. Some gods could no longer be con­sid­ered per­fect (how would you choose?), and there­fore no longer be con­sid­ered gods. Such a dilemma would require a rethink­ing of the gods — but such a thing would be unthinkable.

I sup­pose I should now get to think­ing about how to know what is good…

  1. Mor­ris B. Kaplan, trans., The Socratic Dia­logues (New York: Kaplan Pub­lish­ing, 2009), 12, 16

My Frustration with Ethics

Ethics is at once my favourite and least liked area of inquiry, espe­cially ethics courses.  One such course was an ‘intro­duc­tory’ Bioethics course I took last year; a course which famil­iar­ized and focused on Util­i­tar­i­an­ism, Kant’s Cat­e­gor­i­cal Imper­a­tive, and Virtue Ethics in rela­tion to the ‘prob­lems’ of Bioethics. The prob­lem is that ethics as it’s cur­rently prac­ticed is impos­si­ble, and it frus­trates me. The result is that I’ve taken to read­ing books on ethics (and virtue) and the out­look looks fairly bleak.

It was a com­mon require­ment of my Bioethics course to exam­ine dif­fer­ent issues from the per­spec­tives of at least two moral the­o­ries. I usu­ally chose Util­i­tar­i­an­ism and Kant’s Cat­e­gor­i­cal Imper­a­tive (I think now I would run to Virtue Ethics first). The prob­lem that makes ethics impos­si­ble is that there doesn’t seem the pos­si­bil­ity of con­sen­sus — by this I mean progress, or one eth­i­cal for­mu­la­tion being supe­rior to another — of one being ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’. Ethics courses as I’ve expe­ri­enced them only allow for the pos­si­bil­ity of talk­ing about mean­ing­ful fic­tions, of con­cepts that are abstractly use­ful but lack any real cor­re­la­tion with real­ity. There is no independent-of-human-thinking right or wrong. Take Util­i­tar­i­an­ism, for example.

Of the Util­i­tar­ian view of hap­pi­ness and suf­fer­ing guid­ing our actions, Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre says:

If some­one sug­gests to us, in the spirit of Ben­tham and Mill, that we should guide our own choices by the prospects of our own future plea­sure or hap­pi­ness, the appro­pri­ate retort is to enquire: ‘But which plea­sure, which hap­pi­ness ought to guide me?’ For there are too many dif­fer­ent kinds of enjoy­able activ­ity, too many dif­fer­ent modes in which hap­pi­ness is achieved. And plea­sure or hap­pi­ness are not states of mind for the pro­duc­tion of which these activ­i­ties and modes are merely alter­na­tive means. The pleasure-of-drinking-Guinness is not the pleasure-of-swimming-at-Crane’s-Beach, and the swim­ming and the drink­ing are not two dif­fer­ent means for pro­vid­ing the same end-state. The hap­pi­ness which belongs pecu­liarly to the way of life of the clois­ter is not the same hap­pi­ness as that which belongs pecu­liarly to the mil­i­tary life. For dif­fer­ent plea­sures and dif­fer­ent hap­pi­nesses are to a large degree incom­men­su­rable: there are no scales of qual­ity or quan­tity on which to weight them. Con­se­quently, appeal to the cri­te­ria of plea­sure will not tell me where to drink or swim and appeal to those of hap­pi­ness can­not decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a solider. (Alas­dair Mac­In­tyre, After Virtue, 64)

Yet while this was acknowl­edged, the expec­ta­tion was to still be able to pro­duce some sort of qual­i­fied set of moral actions. The prob­lem becomes com­pounded when you real­ize that such deci­sions are future ori­ented (i.e. future hap­pi­ness, future pain). The the­ory fun­da­men­tally fails, yet I’m expected to use it. That wasn’t the worst of it, for in all this I was told (para­phrased), “While the the­ory as a whole has gaps, there are still nuggets of truth — such as being con­cerned about hap­pi­ness, and suf­fer­ing and the con­se­quences of our actions — that should be gleaned”. But why should I be con­cerned about hap­pi­ness, suf­fer­ing or the con­se­quences of my actions? Doesn’t this itself pre­sup­pose some higher moral order which Util­i­tar­i­an­ism attempts to cor­re­spond to? Or when we talk about the ‘greater good’ of soci­ety, we only push the prob­lem back one step while now talk­ing about some abstract idea — ‘soci­ety’ — instead of peo­ple on an indi­vid­ual basis in spe­cific cir­cum­stances. Unless I have given these terms (“hap­pi­ness,” “suf­fer­ing,” etc.) some sort of author­ity in my think­ing, they are mean­ing­less to me. Isn’t that the whole point of the exer­cise, my being a moral agent able to weigh deci­sions accordingly?

Ethics (moral­ity) is then reduced to a series of “is” or “should” state­ments, rather than “ought” state­ments. Play­ing make-believe is fun for a lit­tle while, but I’m not that imaginative.