So what happens when we try to take our reasons all the way down? When we continue asking why we should do anything? We begin to get to a complex meta-ethical question: what constitutes a reason for action? What is it to have a reason to do something? (Warning: this will be an abstract and theoretical post, but it is important to fundamental questions like why we should do anything at all.)

There are at least three things that this last question could mean, three things we could be saying when we speak of having reasons. I like to distinguish the different kinds of reasons in terms of grammar: it’s so far the most precise way I’ve found of spelling them out. There is on one hand a difference of case, between ablative and dative reasons; and on the other a difference of person, between third-person and first-person reasons. English has the second of these distinctions but not the first.

I know the distinction between ablative and dative from my study of Sanskrit and Pali (and to a lesser extent Latin) grammar; the same distinction, I believe, is there in Greek. (It’s not there in German, which has only a dative and no ablative.) In Sanskrit, ablative and dative case endings can both be used to express what we would normally call reasons; but they are very different kinds of reasons. The ablative case describes a cause; it describes the reason why we did something (or why we’re doing it or will do it). The dative case describes a purpose; it describes our reason to do something. The ablative in this sense is translated with “because”; the dative, with “in order to.”

So when we speak of reasons, it can be helpful to specify whether we’re speaking of reasons in the sense expressed by the dative, or only by the ablative. Ablative reasons are the reasons that natural scientists are best at expressing; they’re the only kinds of reasons discovered by chemistry or physics. Everything in the universe acts according to ablative reasons: the rock fell because it had been dropped (and because of gravity). Essentially, they are causes; the “why” in an ablative reason can be replaced with a “how.” In Aristotle’s scheme of four explanations, they are efficient explanations.

Dative reasons, by contrast, are final explanations; they have to do with purpose, aims, teleology. On Aristotle’s understanding, everything had a dative reason; for a modern scientific understanding, this is not the case. There is no purpose to rocks falling or the sun shining. There is, however, some sort of purpose in the biological action of lifeforms, even on a purely scientific explanation. We cannot explain the movements of, say, blood clotting in a wound entirely on the basis of chemical and physical movement; we explain the blood clotting much more effectively if we can talk about what it’s for, namely to protect the wound and stop bleeding. Purpose is such a central part of biological explanation that, until Darwin, it was the most obvious and preferred proof for the existence of God. Everything biological, from the cell to the ecosystem, acts with some purpose to the preservation and reproduction of life; how could this have happened without the action of a God? Nobody had a good answer to that question until Darwin; ever since then, evolution replaced God in explanations, and people have made attempts to base ethics on evolution (usually failing miserably).

It’s dative and not ablative reasons that are of interest to me here. Ablative reasons help us explain the action of the universe; but they tell us less of interest for ethics. To ask “why should we do something?” we need to ask about purpose.

Some – especially Kant – would step in and require a further distinction among dative reasons. The best way I’ve found of putting this distinction is also grammatical: third-person versus first-person reasons. (My grad-school colleague Drew Schroeder used this distinction to help explain Kant to me, though I don’t think Kant himself puts it in those terms.) When a biologist explains blood clotting in terms of its purpose, Kant would say, that explanation too has nothing to do with what actions we should actually take. The purpose of our action has to come from within us.

Sociologists and psychologists can easily explain actions in dative terms. This is clearest in the case of functionalists like Talcott Parsons, for whom basically every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of its purpose for society at large, but pretty much every social scientist will explain actions in terms of some sort of purpose, including individual self-interest or evolutionary fitness. But they’re still explaining action causally, looking at the social or biological variables that cause one course of action to be taken rather than not taken. In the end these third-person dative reasons still turn out to be efficient explanations: we ask what something is for only in order to explain what caused it. First-person reasons are different: they’re the reasons that we use for choice and deliberation in an action.

On the internalist view, I think, these distinctions look a bit less important. If our reasons for action come down to our existing desires or other motivations, then it may well be sufficient to say that we want X because it gives us pleasure, and it gives us pleasure because our upbringing predisposes us that way. But I think it’s that very way of phrasing the question that looks suspicious to the externalist. Should we really take a view that’s that conservative – that just leaves the preferences formed by genes and upbringing as they are? Don’t we want to have better reasons than just being slaves of our pasts? It’s the sorts of judgements implied in those questions – the idea that it is better to make a free and rational choice – that Kant appeals to, and I don’t think it’s too hard to see the appeal in his view.

Rosen argues that we need to see a much closer association between two fields of study often thought separate: logic and psychology. At first glance, the two might seem to have little in particular to do with one another. Logic concerns itself with the proper formal relationships between statements in arguments; psychology, with the empirical investigation of mind and behaviour.

But more basically, what are logic and psychology? Both, really, are the study of thought. One might narrow logic down a bit and say it is the study of reasoning; but reasoning is very much a part of psychology’s subject matter as well. Their differences are not in their subject matter. There is certainly a difference in method; but that difference flows from a more fundamental difference between the two.

Namely: psychology (or at least certain branches of it) tells us how we do in fact reason. Logic tells us how we should reason. Psychology tells us about the circumstances under which we do or do not follow the rules of reasoning that logic sets down as proper. Which is to say: logic is a normative discipline. That is, logic, like ethics and aesthetics, is concerned with goodness and value – with what should and should not be the case, not merely with what is and is not the case. The idea of a truth that is better than falsehood, and of the methods to discover that truth, is part of what makes logic possible.

The relationship between logic and psychology, taken in this way, is more or less the relationship between ethics and ethics studies, between the philosophy of science and science studies, or between theology and religious studies as religious studies is very often conceived. The latter member of each pair tells us how we do reason (or act); the former tells us how we should. But where the ideals of science, ethics and theology tell us how to reason within their particular fields of inquiry, logic tells us how to reason in the general case, including all the others.

Logic is a normative discipline – a discipline concerned with value – because it is fundamentally concerned with truth. And it is part of the nature of truth to be a value, to be better than falsehood. To deny the intrinsic value or goodness of truth makes no sense, as I argued before in claiming that truth has a value independent of pleasure.

The normative nature of truth holds true whatever one might understand truth to be. Analytic philosophers most commonly identify three theories of the truth of statements (or more generally propositions): correspondence, coherence and pragmatic. Speaking broadly, on the correspondence theory, propositions are true if they correspond to reality; on the coherence theory, propositions are true if they cohere with other propositions we hold; on the pragmatic theory, propositions are true if they are effective. But what is presumed by all three theories is that truth is a good thing: other things being equal, propositions that correspond to reality or that cohere with other propositions or that are effective are better than propositions that do not do these things. And when this is true of the more limited analytical theories of truth, how much more so of more expansive theories of truth that do not limit themselves to propositions, like those of Augustine or Gandhi. Augustine probably goes the furthest on this point: truth is goodness – which is God.

The fact that truth and logic are normative and value-laden has important consequences. For one thing, it gives the lie to simplistic claims of “value-free” science or social science (including psychology itself). All intellectual inquiry is predicated on at least one value, namely truth itself. More sophisticated defenders of “value neutrality,” like Max Weber, will argue that the scholar of a scientific field needs to put truth above other values – but we must recognize that this argument is itself a value argument, an ethical argument for the importance of truth relative to other values, at least within certain areas of inquiry. The argument that one should place truth above other values is a normative and value-based argument.

Now the discussion above should not imply that all true statements are good statements, or all true things are good things. It is true that outlying areas of Bangkok were recently hit by disastrous floods; it is not good that this happened. The relation between truth and goodness is and must be more complex than that.

The fact that not all true things are good probably seems obvious to anyone who isn’t a philosopher; but it nevertheless poses some problems. For someone like Augustine who identifies truth with goodness, it would seem to be at the very heart of the problem of bad. If truth is goodness, how can there be things that truly exist but are nevertheless bad? Augustine ingeniously deals with this problem (or at least this aspect of the problem) by identifying badness as a lack of the existence of good – in the same way a modern physicist identifies cold as simply a lack of heat. Absolute evil, on his account, looks very much like absolute zero.

Probably the most widespread argument for the existence of God today is the cosmological argument. (I discount the “Reformed epistemology” argument, which is not actually an argument that God exists but only that those who already believe in him should continue to do so.) According to the cosmological argument, we need explanations for everything, and then explanations for those explanations, which ultimately must come back to a First Explanation. In the more simplistic and less satisfying versions of this argument, the First Explanation is simply a first cause, a temporal beginning that sets the universe in motion. Such a first cause has little to do with the claims I’ve been making about value. But as I’ve noted a couple of times, the First Cause is hardly a proof of anything Godlike. After that first act of creation, the First Cause can just go home and ignore us and be ignored.

But things look rather different through if we view explanation more broadly, as Aristotle did. For among Aristotle’s four aitia, the so-called “four causes” that are really four explanations, is the “final” explanation: one explains a thing through its purpose, its telos, what it is for. And on the more sophisticated cosmological argument, not merely causes but purposes must go back to something: there must be a First Purpose of sorts, the telos of every other telos, an end to end all ends. The First Purpose, as opposed to the First Cause, is exactly an explanation of value; questions of “why should I do X?” will ultimately lead back to it. And if such an ultimate purpose exists, it takes the kind of guiding role in our lives that God would be expected to take.

C.S. Lewis’s moral argument for God’s existence claims that there is a basic universal human set of moral rules, and that this could not exist without a creator having put it there. I don’t think this argument works; differences in historically observed moral codes are far greater than Lewis takes them to be, and Lewis too readily conflates explanation at the level of value with the kind of causal explanation that evolution at least theoretically could provide. However, it seems to me that in his own confused way, Lewis is trying to get at something like the argument of the earlier weeks: to posit God as the explanation for real value. In that sense, it seems to me that Lewis’s argument, like the First Cause argument, turns out to be a confused version of the more sophisticated First Purpose argument.

Even Anselm’s ontological argument can be viewed in a somewhat similar light. Unlike the First Purpose and moral arguments, it is not exactly an attempt to explain the existence of value. But it does something parallel. It starts with an idea of value and goodness of a certain kind, observed by the mind, in the concept of a perfect being. This concept doesn’t make sense – so the argument goes – unless it exists in reality. The evaluative concept of a highest perfection, here, cannot be understood unless it turns out to really exist.

Whether the argument from design also follows a similar line of reasoning is more debatable. In a sense it works by conflating cause and purpose – by examining the purposes apparent in living beings and assuming those must be caused by an intelligent designer. But then it doesn’t really matter, because that is the one argument that – notwithstanding the arguments of intelligent design proponents – has been decisively refuted by empirical evidence. With the idea of evolution to explain the complexity of life on earth, we do not need an idea of God; of course there are gaps in evolutionary theory, as there are in any scientific theory, but they are much smaller than the gaps in any theory of divine design. Before Darwin, the design argument was by far the most compelling argument for God’s existence; now it is the least, and not because the others have gotten any stronger.

I tie together the proofs of God in this way because I want to get at the heart of the God question in philosophy – and I think that question ultimately comes down to the problem of bad and the problem of good. It is not that I necessarily buy any of the arguments discussed here, even the more sophisticated ones. The problem of suffering is too intractable – it’s at least as big a problem for those who believe in God as the problem of value is for those who don’t. But perhaps there is some sort of dialectical synthesis to be found in between?

I’m going to begin this week not with God, but with Buddhism. Because I think one of the most deep and important elements of Buddhist tradition is precisely its atheism. That atheism is, indeed, a great part of what brought me to Buddhism in the first place. The teaching on suffering was what really got me hooked on Buddhism, but it wasn’t what had got me interested in the first place; indeed, it had initially repelled me. Even despite my repulsion, I’d done a lot of reading on Buddhism during my time in Thailand; that was what made it possible for me to see how Buddhism applied directly to my life, when the time came for me to make that grand discovery. And why? Well, part of it, as I’ve said in telling the story here, was that the temples were so gorgeous and I was drawn into the worldview behind them. But there was also something that had drawn me to Buddhism well before I ever saw a Thai temple, and that was its atheism. In a journal that I wrote while travelling around India at age 19, I had noted that “in my Indian travels it was Buddhism, more than Hinduism or Islam, which seemed the most profound and interesting of the Indian religions — probably because it’s not technically a religion at all. You can be an agnostic or even an atheist and still be a Buddhist, because God or Gods don’t figure.”

I still think this is something remarkable about Buddhism, at least in its Theravāda variant. Unlike Epicureanism, a similarly atheistic tradition which died out within a century or two, Buddhist tradition survived for thousands of years while denying that there were gods out there. And I don’t think it’s just me for whom this is an appealing point: in an atheistic age where we are more aware than ever of the hideous sufferings that befall our fellow human beings, and where Darwin managed to dispense with God as the explanation for life’s diversity, Buddhism provides the kind of wise and enduring tradition that the various theisms provide, without having that God at the core. It is significant in this respect that an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris has spoken highly of “Buddhist wisdom,” even as he wishes to divorce it from “religion.”

But just as Buddhism has some of the advantages of atheism, it can also face its disadvantages – and especially, the one I first spoke of three weeks ago. I discussed the ways that the atheistic thinkers of early twentieth-century analytic philosophy, like Ayer and Moore, struggle to make sense of ideas of value and goodness, often giving highly implausible responses. But I am increasingly thinking that Buddhists face the same difficulty.

Damien Keown, widely regarded as one of the most prominent experts on Buddhist ethics, has increasingly begun putting forth the view that there is no such thing: that Buddhism is “morality without ethics,” in that Buddhists do little to justify the claims they make about what we should and shouldn’t do. I have disputed this claim in my dissertation; in Śāntideva I have found many arguments why certain actions are good and others are bad. I think such arguments are found in other Buddhist thinkers as well. But I also think there is a certain way in which Keown is on to something. The most persuasive of Śāntideva’s ethical arguments appeal to values Śāntideva expects us to already have. They have a means-end approach: since we all wish to end suffering, we should therefore take whatever action is being recommended (avoid anger, avoid lust, and so on.)

But why should we wish to end suffering? What makes suffering bad? Śāntideva responds to this question directly, in a way that no other Buddhist (that I am aware of) does. But I do not find his very brief answer satisfactory. It occurs in Bodhicaryāvatāra verse VIII.103, within his famous equalization of self and other, in which he argues that since the self is unreal, one should prevent everyone’s suffering and not only one’s own. Having said this, he entertains an objection (pūrvapakṣa) to the effect of “Why is suffering to be prevented?” (kasmān nivāryaṃ cet) and responds with sarveṣām avivādataḥ: literally “Because of the non-dispute of everyone.” Or in Crosby and Skilton’s simpler and crisper translation: “No one disputes that!”

But this won’t do. It is not just that his imagined objector does indeed seem to be disputing that suffering should be prevented. What Śāntideva is doing here is very similar to Mill’s argument in Utilitarianism that the only reason one can give for finding happiness or pleasure (or anything else) desirable is “that people do actually desire it.” G.E. Moore thought this the classic example of a “naturalistic fallacy,” of illegitimately deriving a “should” from an “is,” in that “desirable” means what should be desired rather than what is; it does not mean “able to be desired” in the way that “visible” means “able to be seen.” But as Alasdair MacIntyre points out in A Short History of Ethics, there is a way to read Mill which does not rest on linguistic equivocation, and I think the same applies to Śāntideva (changing “pleasure” to “the absence of suffering”):

He treats the thesis that all men desire pleasure as a factual assertion which guarantees the success of an ad hominem appeal to anyone who denies his conclusion. If anyone denies that pleasure is desirable, then we can ask him, But don’t you desire it? and we know in advance that he must answer yes, and consequently must admit that pleasure is desirable.

I think Śāntideva’s argument is most persuasively read as just this sort of “ad hominem appeal.” But this is still insufficient. For one thing, many would indeed argue against ending suffering – most notably Nietzsche, who believed that suffering can ennoble us and make us better people. Or even Penelope Trunk, who, after considerable reflection, decided she would rather suffer because happiness is boring. One could, I suppose, bite the bullet and say “fine, then, those people don’t need Buddhism and their life will be perfectly good without it,” but this is not a response that would be acceptable to the vast majority of Buddhist tradition to date – certainly not to Śāntideva himself.

Moreover, Śāntideva’s very argument rests on denying one of our most deeply felt beliefs – the existence of a self. If even our basic selfhood – the one sole thing that Descartes thought completely indubitable – is available for dispute, then surely the prevention of suffering is as well. One might well reply to the ad hominem: “Well, yes, I believe my suffering should be prevented. But I also believe that there’s a self, and that that’s the whole reason it makes sense to prevent any suffering at all. If you really knock down the self, you knock down the prevention of suffering – and maybe the existence of suffering – with it.” (This point is roughly similar to Paul Williams’s objection.)

In short, Śāntideva – possibly the most sophisticated ethical theorist in Buddhist tradition – fails, like the twentieth-century analytic philosophers, to provide a satisfactory account of why we should value the things we do value. And I suspect that this is not a coincidence: that Buddhists, like empiricists, have a hard time justifying their value system because they do not assign value a place underlying the metaphysics of reality. The obvious objection to the claim is karma; but karma is held to be a potentially observable causal law of the universe, comparable in theory to the laws discovered by scientists. Karma does not make things valuable, and so it does not suffice as an explanation of the nature of value.

Several comments from Jesse took this approach. “Morality,” he claims, “has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.” Citing game theory, he notes that organisms which helped each other out would have been far more likely to survive and thrive. Ethan Mills, while somewhat skeptical of the game-theoretic explanation, still cites James Rachels for another kind of evolutionary explanation: at the social rather than individual level, societies wouldn’t have lasted long without morality.

Now I am not and was not speaking only of “morality” in the sense of aiding (or refusing to harm) others. (There was a reason the word “morality” didn’t appear in that post.) As I noted in my comment, I was also speaking of other kinds of value – including virtues like self-discipline and patient endurance that would be valuable whether or not anyone else is around, and for that matter of aesthetic value, the value in good art or the beauty of nature.

But that’s not the big issue here, for it’s not so hard to come up with evolutionary explanations for these other kinds of value either. Self-disciplined creatures would very likely have adapted better to their environments. There are plenty of people, perhaps most notably Denis Dutton, who have even tried to find evolutionary explanations for aesthetics.

I am not going to pass judgement here on whether evolution is a correct or adequate causal explanation for the origins of human value judgements. For the sake of argument, in this post, I am going to assume that such accounts get the causal origin of value judgements basically correct. Because far more important is a deeper criticism: they miss the point.

The error being made here is parallel to the one that tries to prove God’s existence merely as a First Cause of the universe, not as a First Explanation. In this bastardized version of the cosmological argument, the causal processes of the universe must have a starting point, identified with God – a rather useless God, one that doesn’t mean anything more than the Big Bang. But the intellectually respectable form of the cosmological argument isn’t just about causes, but about other kinds of explanation: not just where the world comes from, but what its essence is and what it’s for.

Return more directly to the present topic: to explain the causes of value judgements, to identify where they have their origin, is not actually to explain value. What this kind of explanation explains is the bare fact that people happen to make judgements of value. What it doesn’t and can’t explain is the truth or falsity of those judgements. To have an adequate account of ethics and values, we need to know not merely why people happen to think some things good and some things bad (or why they act accordingly). We need to know why things actually are good and bad. (Our mode of explanation needs to be ethics, not ethics studies.)

Few are seriously prepared to jettison this distinction, between what actually is good or bad and what people merely believe to be so. We want to say that Pol Pot was wrong when he thought it was a good thing to commit genocide on his own people. To consistently say such a thing requires that we believe value judgements can be correct or incorrect; they need to have a referent, to refer to the action having a real goodness or badness independent of whether the agent takes the action or believes in its goodness. (Some do try and advocate a thoroughgoing value relativism, of course; I have responded to some such arguments here, here and here.)

I think the early analytic philosophers, more than those who find evolutionary explanations sufficient, at least grappled with this problem – they just failed to solve it. They asked: what do we mean when we call something good or bad? Those who try to reduce judgements of good or bad to a simple descriptive property – good is what fosters the species, produces pleasure, etc. – run into trouble pretty quickly, for it’s pretty clear that a great many usages of “good” do not simply mean any of these things. One could try and argue that those who use “good” to mean anything other than species preservation or the production of pleasure are mistaken, but they’ll have a pretty hard time making the case. Neil Sinhababu made a valiant effort, but I have argued that he failed, with some additional thoughts.

I have many problems with G.E. Moore’s concept of the naturalistic fallacy, and especially with the inadequate alternative he provided (as I discussed last week) – but I suspect that this important point is where he was coming from when he came up with it. Moore took the idea of the naturalistic fallacy much too far; I think one can legitimately make inferences from “is” to “ought” statements, but one should still be careful about doing so, especially when one puts a particular kind of descriptive claim at the heart of one’s ethics. The problem is nicely illustrated by Ayn Rand in this deeply problematic passage:

the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.” (The Virtue of Selfishness, p.17)

What Rand doesn’t seem to have thought of is that such a view can have absolutely nothing to say to the person who chooses to kill herself – in suicide, in war, in civil disobedience. If your system of values comes out of the desire to live, it is irrelevant to anyone who takes that desire as unimportant. I think there’s a similar problem with the point Ethan makes in his comment that Buddhism is ultimately based on our desire to end suffering; not everybody treats that desire as decisively important, and I think Buddhists have a problem addressing those who don’t. (I intend to take up this point more next week.)

How to get around this problem? I note that Ethan lists Aristotle as having a “naturalist” theory of ethics comparable to Rand’s or Sinhababu’s. But Aristotle’s theory is a bit different from theirs, in that he sees value as an inextricable part of the natural world. The idea of God as First Explanation ultimately derives from his thought, because for him explanation needs to be teleological as well as causal: you need to explain things in terms of their purposes, what they’re for, as well as their (efficient) causes, what put them there. Aristotle’s views of nature are of course tied up with beliefs about causes that we cannot share in a scientific age. But it seems to me that we may still need something like them in order to make sense of value.

This problem is not quite the opposite of the problem of suffering. Those who don’t believe in an ultimate value of this sort – I am here going to call them “atheists” as a shorthand, though I think that runs the risk of oversimplifying the matter – have no problem explaining the existence of particular good things, the way that theists have a problem explaining the existence of hurricanes or ALS. The problem they face, rather, is in the basic question of how things can be good (or bad) at all, of how the very ideas of goodness or badness can mean anything.

The analytical movement in early twentieth-century philosophy rejected not only “religion” but most forms of metaphysics, looking with deep suspicion on any claims about the universe that could not be demonstrated empirically. As a result, they came up with (highly implausible) theories about ethics and value that often dismissed them entirely. For A.J. Ayer, value claims are entirely meaningless; C.L. Stevenson argued that they mean nothing more than the expressions “boo” and “hurrah,” with no rational content. G.E. Moore wasn’t quite as dismissive – the word “good” did mean something real – but it was also something undefinable, like “yellow” (referring to the subjective perception of yellowness as a colour, not the way in which yellow objects happen to refract light). What this effectively meant was that it was impossible to argue rationally about what was good; you just knew. The economist John Maynard Keynes, who knew Moore well, witnessed firsthand the anti-intellectual bullying that resulted from such an approach in Moore’s social circle:

How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalyzable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue…. In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method — greeting one’s remarks with a gasp of incredulity — Do you really mean that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility … Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. (Keynes, “My Early Beliefs”)

These various analytical attempts to analyze value judgements are all pretty clear failures, to my mind; in many cases they explain away value judgements rather than actually explaining them. But they all come within a shared context of rejecting metaphysics – and thereby rejecting any metaphysical status for goodness in the universe. It seems to me that the rejection of a metaphysics of goodness leaves them bereft of any ability to speak reasonably about what goodness actually is. Alasdair MacIntyre, with the Nietzschean wit that characterizes his early work, compares the analytic philosophers to Hawai’ian natives who would explain prohibitions by saying that they are taboo, but not be able to explain what taboo means – so that soon enough King Kamehameha II could abolish the taboos without any serious objections arising:

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten…. But had the Polynesian culture enjoyed the blessings of analytical philosophy it is all too clear that the question of the meaning of taboo could have been resolved in a number of ways. Taboo, it would have been said by one party, is clearly the name of a non-natural property; and precisely the same reasoning which led Moore to see good as the name of such a property and Prichard and Ross to see obligatory and right as the names of such properties would have been available to show that taboo is the name of such a property.

MacIntyre then compares Nietzsche to Kamehameha II, shattering the pretensions of those who claim “good” still means something in the absence of the “background beliefs” that make that meaning possible. It is not that Nietzsche wins the debate, that good means nothing; but that for us to see the meaning of good we must have the kind of underlying beliefs that the twentieth-century analytic philosophers did not.

What are those underlying beliefs? It seems to me that, at base, they require goodness to have a real, objective existence, beyond that which people happen to value at any particular place and time. Reality, the larger stage in which our lives take place, what Ken Wilber calls the Kosmos – what is most often called “the universe” or “the world” except that these terms usually limit themselves to the physical – it must somehow have value and goodness as a part of its nature, at least insofar as human beings exist within it. Seeing that goodness at the heart of the world is a lot easier if you take the next step and view that world as the creation of an omnibenevolent God. But then, of course, it winds up being a lot harder to explain the world’s observed badness.

Teaching students who did not want to be there was not always a joy. The wonderful advantage of teaching Stonehill’s required courses, though, was that there was almost no restriction on content. My love of big cross-cultural questions does not play well with the specialization taught in grad school and encouraged in academic publishing, where one must learn one thing and nothing else. But I could design these courses the way I wanted. The religion department had decided it wanted one common reference point that upper-year students could turn back to, and it had decided on the book of Exodus. But as long as you taught Exodus, the rest of the course was all up to you.

And so one semester I decided I wanted to learn more about Western monotheisms, and entitled my intro religion course “God in the West.” All that Buddhism and “Hinduism” I’d studied in grad school – never mind that. Because that was stuff I already knew pretty well. One of the things I hoped to impart to my students was a love of learning; and so I decided I would teach them a subject I wanted to learn about myself.

And learn I did. The course gave me a chance to really think with the monotheisms, especially Christianity – and in so doing I moved considerably closer to atheism. For I’d wanted to challenge my students’ complacent, mellow, liberal moralistic-therapeutic deism by showing it criticized from both sides: both the severe conservatism of an Augustine, calling for more Christian piety, and the problem of suffering, which effectively calls for less.

Until I taught that course, I had never really paid much attention to the problem of suffering. I thought it didn’t really matter, since I didn’t believe in an omnipotent omnibenevolent God in the first place; I hadn’t been raised with such a belief and never saw a reason to adopt it. But in teaching Christianity I attempted to think with it, in its terms, and I saw just how serious a problem this is. Until that point I had seen myself as vaguely theist; I believed in a capital-T Truth like the Platonic Good, a universal which seemed a lot like God. But as I saw my students grapple with theodicy, it hit home for me that this “philosopher’s God” really has little to do with what most people understand God to be. For them, God is there actively moving the universe along; things are the way they are because God wants them to be. But given the vast and terrible suffering in the universe – including all the suffering that has nothing to do with human free will – it seems like a cruel joke to describe such a God as omnibenevolent, universally good. An omnibenevolent and omnipotent God was really nowhere even close to anything I believed in.

I tried to teach a few theologians who would defend God, but their justifications seemed enormously unsatisfying. The best I could find was Richard Swinburne‘s case for a “half-finished universe,” extending the free-will defence so that it is our job to perfect the world and end suffering. Putting aside the question of whether this is even possible (as with similar questions one could ask of Buddhists), it still hardly seems an adequate resolution. How can this be fair to all the people whose lives are cruelly, brutally sacrificed in pursuit of this perfection? They don’t get to see the perfect world to come. Swinburne seems to advocate an oddly Maoist God, who can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs; this celestial utopian scarcely seems better than the earthly utopians like Mao and Stalin, whom we rightly judge today as murderers.

In some respects my students’ answer seemed better than Swinburne’s: it could all be made worthwhile and redeemed by the ultimate promise of an afterlife in heaven. Within the system that seems more consistent to me; but one still would need to find evidence for the existence of this heavenly afterlife, and I’ve never heard of any.

In short, having attempted to take the Christian God seriously for the length of a course, I came out much more predisposed against him. I would be reluctant to say, though, that teaching the course made me an atheist. For the word “atheist” is usually claimed today by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, sneering know-nothings who thrive on contempt and disdain for anything alien to their worldview. It’s an attitude I already disliked, and if anything I came out of the very same course disliking it more.

For while I ended up thinking less of God, I also ended up thinking more of that much-maligned text attributed to him, the Hebrew Bible. Though I do think it’s ultimately philosophically inconsistent, I came to admire the book of Ecclesiastes not only for its poetic beauty, but also its attempt to reflect on the harsh world we live in, in which the righteous so often suffer and the wicked thrive. Ecclesiastes is an admirable early attempt to face this world with open eyes.

Perhaps more importantly, I also had my students read A.J. Jacobs’s highly enjoyable The Year of Living Biblically, which is exactly what it sounds like. Jacobs, a secular New York Jew, decided he’d one-up all the fundamentalists by trying his best to follow all the Bible’s commandments to the best of his ability. The original idea was to remind people how ridiculous the Bible commandments really are. And yet Jacobs found his life improving by following several of the commands – and not just the popular ones like loving your neighbour. Obeying the injunction to wear only white, he found himself becoming more cheerful, having a sunny disposition; refusing to use swear words, he found himself watching his emotions and avoiding trivial anger. These turned out not to be ridiculous after all – even when he didn’t have to do so for his book, Jacobs continued wearing white and saying prayers of thanksgiving.

Biblical commands, like the injunctions in dharmaśāstra, are not ethics; they are not philosophy. There is little reasoning or argument given there; one is merely ordered to do this and not do that. And yet Jacobs’s experience helps remind us that someone wrote those texts, and put those commands in there for a reason. Many of those reasons may have lost their force today; but some of them haven’t. Following those commands worked for a lot of people for a long time; it would take a truly heroic leap of cynicism to believe millions of people followed them for thousands of years entirely out of stupidity or gullibility. We cannot and should not swallow the ideas and practices of history’s traditions in their entirety; but we ignore or casually dismiss them at our peril.

I mention this now because that first podcast is with Jason Clower on his The Unlikely Buddhologist, the study I recently mentioned of 20th-century Confucian Mou Zongsan. The podcast is there to explore Clower’s ideas; here I’d like to add my own.

The book asks why Mou, a committed Confucian, spent a great deal of time thinking and writing about Buddhism. Its answer is that Mou found East Asian Buddhists expressing metaphysical distinctions with a clarity that the Confucians had not. Mou is deeply concerned with the metaphysics of value – specifically, the relationship between ultimate value and existing things. One might refer to this as the relationship between goodness and truth, or between God and world, even creator and creation. Mou thinks the Buddhists provide conceptual tools to discuss this relationship which the Confucians didn’t have.

The key metaphysical distinction Mou takes from the Buddhists is between “perfect theories” (yuanjiao 圓教), monist theories according to which existing things are ultimately identical to the one good, and “separation theories” (biejiao 別教) in which they are fundamentally distinct. Mou identifies Tiantai Buddhism as the key example of perfect theory, and Yogācāra as separation theory; both believe in “buddha nature” as an ultimate value in the universe, but for Tiantai we are identical with it in a way we are not for Yogācāra (or so Mou claims). He is a strong advocate of “perfect theory,” and with that monism he sets his Confucianism apart from many others’. Especially, he rejects the thought of Zhu Xi, probably the most influential Confucian thinker since ancient days, because Zhu insists that Heaven (tian 天, the ultimate source of goodness in Confucianism) is separate from the human mind.

The debate Mou examines between perfect and separation theories may seem like the kind of abstract technical debate that is relevant only to Buddhist-influenced neo-Confucians. But I don’t think it is. I’m coming to think the distinction is quite a powerful one for cross-cultural philosophy – because it applies even to traditions Mou doesn’t really think about or care about. It seems to me that in key respects it is the same debate that I – following Skholiast – have previously characterized as a debate between ātmanism and encounter.

Perfect theories are “ātmanist”: they claim that created things, trees and jars and human beings, reveal themselves in the end as equivalent to the ultimate truth or good. The idea of ultimate “encounter,” by contrast, requires that the ultimate source of value (Heaven, Buddha-nature, God) remain ultimately distinct from flawed, fallen worldly beings. Here’s the thing: I spoke of this debate primarily in the terms of Indian Sufism. Sufis typically aim at an experience of mystical oneness with God; the Indian Sufis debated whether this meant that human beings really were one with God, or whether God must ultimately be irreducibly distinct from us. That is exactly what’s at issue between perfect theory and separation theory as Mou describes them – even though Indian Sufism is a tradition which, to my knowledge, Mou had absolutely nothing to do with.

It goes further. Skholiast, in setting out the terms of ātmanism and encounter, was drawing on still other traditions. He used the term “ātmanist” to refer to Ken Wilber, who draws perhaps most heavily from Aurobindo, and clearly draws the term from Advaita Vedānta, the tradition whose central teaching is that everything is all one ātman (self). And “encounter,” with which Skholiast contrasts Wilber and Advaita, draws heavily on the thought of 20th-century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas. Yet neither Judaism and Vedānta registered much on Mou’s radar either – when he looked outside of China philosophically it was mainly to Kant, with occasional references to Christianity and Indian Buddhism.

It seems to me, then, that in exploring perfect and separation theories, Mou is asking a perennial question. Across very different philosophical contexts, people have struggled at length with perfect and separation theories, the question of the relationship between ultimate value and everyday things. It’s a question well worth thinking about.

Mou’s answer also bears some thought, because it leads in a fairly distinctive direction. The perennial questions I’ve most commonly examined have been the questions of ascent vs. descent and intimacy vs. integrity. How do perfect and separation theories (ātmanism and encounter) relate to these questions? At first, perfect theories seem to map relatively well onto theories of integrity ascent, like Advaita, which aim to transcend this world for a solitary unity, and theories of intimacy descent, like those of Lévinas or Martha Nussbaum, which embrace the physical world and its relationships. Integrity-ascent views, like perfect theories, point us at a metaphysical unity we can identify with if we cast off our mistaken identifications with the physical world. Intimacy-descent views, like separation theories, warn us of the arrogance of a quest for perfection and ask us to embrace a flawed world that will never fit a perfect good.

Mou, however, flips this all around. His metaphysical “perfect theory” is combined with an ethics of intimacy descent. In practical terms, Mou is resolutely Confucian. Not for him any monastic rejection of worldly goods; the human life is best lived in the everyday world of work and family. We live best when we recognize that ultimate metaphysical value is found right in all of these everyday things. Mou is unusual in thinking that perfect theory makes a good fit with an intimacy-descent life. His approach resembles that of the Bhagavad Gītā: act in the finite with your eye on the infinite. Moreover, I think it gets around the objection that Nussbaum makes to the Gītā’s kind of view: she claims that one isn’t really living in the material world if one doesn’t identify with it, if one goes through the motions like a “play-actor.” Here Mou’s view of perfect theory is distinct: unlike Advaita, the material world for him is no illusion. Heaven or buddha-nature, the source of ultimate value and goodness, are all there in the material world, and that’s exactly why it’s so important to live in it and play by its rules.

Levenson responds: wait a minute. For Trinitarian Christians (the vast majority today and for most of Christianity’s history), Jesus is God in a fundamental sense; but for a Jew (or Muslim), to say that a man is God is an idolatry that drastically compromises God’s fundamental oneness and uniqueness. While the content of the Tanakh – the Hebrew Bible as understood by Jews – may be mostly the same as that of the Old Testament, they are read in a very different light. To understand the Tanakh, Jews turn to Mishnah and Talmud; to understand the Old Testament, Christians turn to the New. As a result, the stories of the Hebrew Bible unfold very differently in each – they are even placed in a different order, so that the Tanakh culminates with the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, while the Old Testament ends with a prophesy heralding the “coming of the Lord.” And this isn’t just a matter of arcane scriptural study: it affects one’s ethics, one’s idea of the good life. Jewish ethics have been traditionally focused on following God’s laws and commandments as revealed in Torah, Christian ethics on following Jesus’s example – or even more so on faith in him and his saving grace.

Now my interest in Levenson is not in the particulars of Jewish and Christian traditions, since I identify with neither tradition. Rather, what I deeply appreciate is his criticism of Dabru Emet‘s method. Such documents, Levenson argues, “avoid any candid discussion of fundamental beliefs,” and “adopt instead the model of conflict resolution or diplomatic negotiation.” The history of violence across traditions is of course long and bloody. So, in an effort to prevent such violence, one smooths the differences over to the point that they no longer really seem to matter. The traditions, effectively, no longer say anything.

I was reminded of this point when I attended the National Seminar on Comparative Religion at the University of Allahabad in 2005, celebrating the founding of a department of comparative religion. In a country racked by conflict between Islam and “Hinduism,” the presenters had the laudable goal of trying to celebrate commonalities – but often in ways that presented more harm than good. One non-Muslim presenter even said she stressed her respect for Islam by placing an idol of Muhammad beside the other statues she prayed to – apparently not realizing that Muslims have traditionally considered idolatry of any kind to be a cardinal sin, even forbidding depictions of Muhammad. She was perhaps the clearest example of something the advocates of “interreligious dialogue” so often do: she missed the point of the tradition she was dealing with.

It is of course difficult to speak of “the” point of any given tradition. And some forms of some traditions are quite compatible with this approach to interreligious dialogue. The best example I know of is Reconstructionist Judaism. As I understand it, Reconstructionists see different traditions, such as Judaism, as “civilizations,” cultures laden with history and ritual, more than beliefs or paths to enlightenment or codes of ethics. This Judaism is more of an ethnicity than a soteriology.

Such a view might similarly suit much of what is today called “Hinduism.” Vasudha Narayanan, former president of the AAR, once in its journal juxtaposed “liberation and lentils.” Raised Hindu, Narayanan associated her tradition more with cultural rituals, such as her relatives’ choosing the auspicious kind of lentil for particular festivals, rather than the philosophical and mythological accounts of liberation that were spoken of in her graduate coursework. This “lentil Hinduism” sounds a lot like the Reconstructionist account of a religious civilization. And that account does indeed seem to fit many members of such traditions, so closely associated with a particular ethnic or national group.

But, one might ask, what about the thinkers classified as “Hindu” who do stress “liberation”? They might be a minority, but they’re there. Nobody reading the works of Śaṅkara or Rāmānuja could imagine that their traditions are all about finding the auspicious lentils for the right occasion. Śaṅkara is not trying to give us a culture, a set of traditional practices that give a group its ethnic identity. Like a Buddhist, he is trying to free us from the suffering inherent in worldly life. And his path is not necessarily compatible with others.

Śaṅkara himself provides an important challenge to the advocates of Dabru Emet-style reduction of differences among traditions. For he’s often taken to be saying all paths are equally valid – but he isn’t. True, in Śaṅkara’s Advaita tradition, it doesn’t matter which god you worship; any deity can be a viable path to the ultimate. You can worship Gaṇeśa, or Krishna, or Jesus – it’s up to you. But that’s because in some respect the gods you see ultimately reveal themselves to be illusions, compared to the one ultimate truth. More importantly, the Buddhists, who don’t worship gods, are just plain wrong, and he spends a large portion of his work attacking them and explaining why.

There are real differences between – and within – traditions, and those differences matter. The life of the ideal Confucian, deeply immersed in family life and politics, is worlds away from the
life of the ideal Jain, seeking monastic liberation from all the fetters of this world. It matters a great deal which one is right – or if both or neither are right. It makes all the difference in the world. That is why I’ve defended the practice of apologetics, of attempting to convert others, even when performed by relatively ignorant people like FOX’s Brit Hume – it is ignorant attempts to convert, not attempts to convert as such, that are the problem. It may be the case, especially in places like India, that one should publicly diminish the differences between traditions for pragmatic political reasons – pretending to agree when one doesn’t, in order to reduce violence. Here finding the truth of the matter is less important than keeping people alive. But as Levenson points out, such an approach has no place in a document whose Hebrew name means “to speak the truth.”

I generally lean toward saying no – and an uncertain no. I leave the possibility open that something will be revealed to me that I can be absolutely certain of; but I don’t think one exists. The happy thing about this kind of uncertainty is there’s no contradiction in it. While “there is no truth” is a contradiction because it asserts that the truth is there is no truth, and “we cannot know anything” is a contradiction because it implies that it can be known that nothing can be known, the same is not true about “we cannot be certain about anything.” The last can be asserted as a statement that is merely highly probable; it doesn’t need to be certain to be true, and therefore can be true without contradicting itself.

Still, I do think there’s one circumstance where real certainty is possible – though it is merely a hypothetical circumstance. My thoughts here go back to an exchange on an early post of mine, dealing with C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” about Jesus. Lewis tries to argue against those who see Jesus as a great human moral teacher. Following from the (highly arguable) claim that Jesus claimed he was the only begotten son of God, Lewis tells us we have only three options: Jesus actually was the only son of God; he was lying; or he was insane. I pointed to the example of Mohandas Gandhi as someone who was at least a little bit insane, and yet also a great moral teacher. Defending Lewis, commenter DJR argued that – assuming Jesus did in fact believe he was the Son – such a belief is far more insane than Gandhi’s morally questionable beliefs and quirks. In my reply I noted:

Suppose you actually were the only begotten Son of God. How would you know? Whatever certainty you might have, whatever reasons you might have to justify the belief, couldn’t there also be someone who wasn’t the Son and had the same beliefs and certainty? Psychologically, from the inside, it would seem hard to tell the difference, unless there’s something I’m missing. The upshot of all this would seem to be: if Jesus the Christ can be relied on as a great moral teacher, then why can’t Jesus the mere human being? The core belief is true in one case and false in another, but it’s very difficult to tell which.

But I realize in retrospect that there would be a way to know. If you really were the Son of God as that idea is typically understood, you would know everything. And if you knew everything, then you could be certain that you were the Son – and you could be certain of everything else too.

I say this because I think the necessity of doubt follows from our status as finite and limited human beings. Whatever we’re most confident of, there are always other very smart people out there who have thought about the issue at length. They may very well have come up with something that we didn’t. Even assuming (as I do) that truth as such is out there and does not vary from person to person, we still can’t have absolutely reliable access to it as individuals; we could always be wrong.

A genuinely omniscient being, on the other hand, would have no such constraint. Such a being, by definition, would already know every argument that had ever made or ever would be. (And someone who was such a being could likely verify this knowledge with little difficulty.) Only in this position of omniscience would one eliminate the need for doubt, and have absolute certainty.

I suspect these points are among the reasons for the widespread popularity of belief in omniscient beings. Even early Buddhists, whose beliefs don’t depend on any kind of divinity, still claim that the buddhas are omniscient. The thing is, such a belief helps wrap up a tricky philosophical problem: given that our knowledge as finite humans is necessarily limited and partial and subjective, how can we say anything about what’s actually or objectively true? If you posit an omniscient being, you can be done with it in a sense: the objective truth was found by that guy over there, whose knowledge isn’t finite. This step seems to have been taken most explicitly by the Jains, with their theory of anekāntavāda: they argued that we each see a limited side or part of the truth, but it is only the tīrthaṅkaras, the fully liberated beings, who can see the whole thing.

The problem with taking such a step, of course, is that then you, as a finite human being, still have to establish that the tīrthaṅkaras or the buddhas or Jesus or whatever similar beings actually were omniscient. I’ve yet to see a good argument for that, and that’s why I don’t believe that there are omniscient beings. But I understand the urge to create them.