Explaining evil, part 3

Wielenberg is a secular ethicist who labors to be a moral realist. 

Part of the answer…is that for something to be evil is for there to be a reason to avoid or eliminate a thing (123).

But that's indiscriminate since what people take to be something to avoid or eliminate is so variable from one person to the next.  

Whether a person is happy depends on the attitude of someone–namely, the person himself–but it does not depend upon the attitudes of observers towards him (125).

As social creatures, our happiness is typically dependent on the attitudes of others.  

Like Chalmers, I endorse the existence of nonphysical properties (128). 

i) Isn't Chalmers a panpsychic? So that's an appeal to mental properties. But Wielenberg's position seems to be moral platonism rather than panpsychism. 

ii) Assuming he's a Platonist, he must believe basic ethical facts are abstract objects They exist even if there was no universe. 

iii) If so, what are they? They're not physical or mental properties. So they have no analogy in human experience. 

iv) How are they instantiated? What's the mechanism? His nonphysical properties aren't agents and his evolutionary physical processes aren't agents. 

v) Assuming these impersonal immaterial properties exist, how do they obligate human conduct? They didn't create us. They aren't intelligent entities. They are indifferent to human flourishing. Why are we duty-bound to conform our behavior to these impersonal properties? 

vi) If human beings are merely physical organisms, how do we gain access to nonempirical moral facts? How do unintelligent evolutionary processes tap into immaterial moral facts in order to instill them in human beings? It can't be a physical causal connection if one relatum of the cause/effect relation is immaterial. 

Theists typically maintain that the fact that God exists is a brute fact. As Richard Swinburne puts it, "No other agent or natural law or principle or necessity is responsible for the existence of God. His existence is an ultimate brute fact…Many such theists also maintain that God exists necessarily (129).

I call such facts basic ethical facts. Such facts are the foundation of (the rest of) objective morality and the rest on no foundation themselves. To ask of such facts, "Where do they come from?" or "On what foundation do they rest?" is misguided in much the way that, according to many atheists, it is misguided to ask of God, "Where does he come from?"…The answer is the same in both cases: they come from nowhere, and nothing external to themselves grounds their existence; rather, they are fundamental features of the universe that ground other truths.  (130).

Such connections are part of the fundamental, bottom level of reality. It might be objected that such a view builds a suspiciously convenience (from a human perspective) degree of order and rationality into the basic structure of the universe (132).

Atheists, for their part, typically hold that there are some basic laws of nature for which there is no deeper explanation (a commitment that theistic critics often argue is problematic). These basic laws of nature are suspiciously amendable to undemanding by the human mind (133).

What is the source of evil in a godless universe? I propose that objective morality has no foundation external to itself but instead ultimately rests on a foundation of basic ethical facts–necessary ethical truths and no external explanation (138).

Apparently, Wielenberg's strategy is to justify his secular moral realism by drawing parallels with theism:

i) But since he's an atheist, even if there's a parallel methodology, he thinks it's mistaken for theists to posit God as a brute fact. So where does that leave his analogy?

ii) As an atheist, does his position have the metaphysical machinery to accommodate necessary, immaterial properties? As one reviewer observes:

Wielenberg asserts an extremely strong form of ethical realism. Ethical truths are "part of the furniture of the universe". Moreover, they are not only objectively true, but are necessarily true, constituting the "ethical background of every possible universe." (p. 52). Yet it is not at all clear how most of the forms of naturalism currently on offer could support such universal and necessary ethical truths. Wielenberg announces at the start of the book that he is not the brash materialist kind of naturalist who believes that all facts are scientific facts or reducible to the language of physical science. But he goes on nevertheless to endorse a radically materialistic picture of the cosmos, where everything there is arises "through a combination of necessity and chance" (p. 3) from physical and chemical origins. Could such a picture of the universe allow for irreducible necessary truths of morality?

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/value-and-virtue-in-a-godless-universe/

iii) If you already have a good prior reason to believe in necessary moral facts, then that might justify the postulation of whatever is necessary to underwrite them, but isn't Wielenberg's basic position that reality is a bottom-up process, beginning with matter, energy, and physical processes? On that view, what reason is there to think necessary moral facts exist? Even if evolutionary psychology could explain moral instincts, yet upon reflection we come to realize that our moral instincts are an illusion fostered by evolutionary conditioning. 

iv) Apropos (iii), his program is not justifiably analogous to the brute factuality of God, for that appeals to a topdown principle, where mind is prior to matter and energy. 

v) His position seems to be an opportunistic amalgam of moral platonism and evolutionary ethics. But those are two very different paradigms. 

vi) Is it possible for there to be absolutely nothing? If there was nothing at all, would it be true that there was nothing at all? But if there was nothing at all, there'd be no logic, no propositions, no minds with true beliefs. So that's a per impossibile counterfactual. Hence, there can't be absolutely nothing. Rather, there must be something, and that something must include logic and propositions. And arguably, that requires a mind. 

Why does God strongly willing p robustly cause the obtaining of p rather than, say, not-p? Why does God strongly willing p robustly cause anything at all?…It might be suggested that God's essential omnipotence explains the existence of these robust causal connections. But that proposal fails because the existence of robust causal connection is itself a component of divine omnipotence. It appears, then, that my view and the theistic view both require the existence of robust causal connections that are rational and make sense (from a human perspective) and yet for which there is no explanation (133). 

I don't know what he means. God merely willing something doesn't cause it to be. Rather, God creatively and providentially implements his will. Is Wielenberg's objection that we don't know how that happens? 

To take a comparison, if there's evidence that Cartesian dualism is true, then we don't need to know how the mind and body interact to know that they do. But the comparison breaks down with Wielenberg in part because there's no reason, given atheism, to suppose necessary moral facts exist or that evolution is their conduit. 

The operations of the adaptive unconscious are fast, automatic, and effortless, whereas the operations of the conscious mind are slow and effortful…"You round a corner and see a group of young hoodlums pour gasoline on a cat and ignite it…you do not need to conclude that what they are doing is wrong; you do not need to figure anything out; you can see that it is wrong…You do not consciously form the belief: "Those hoodlums are torturing a cat just for fun!" This classification triggers feelings of disgust and outrage in you, and those feelings in turn produce the conscious belief that what the hoodlums are doing is evil…I take it that evolutionary processes have instilled certain moral principles into most human beings (155-57). 

i) That's confused. It's true that we don't infer that what they are doing is evil. It's a spontaneous reaction. But that doesn't mean we literally see it. Moral properties are unempirical. Rather, we interpret the action as evil. We have a moral framework to evaluate the action. 

ii) Furthermore, the thugs don't think what they are doing is evil. So what is Wielenberg's standard of comparison? He can't appeal to necessary moral facts, for who's to say the action of the thugs may not correspond to a necessary moral fact? Indeed, cruelty is commonplace in human behavior. Evolutionary processes have instilled sadism in human nature. 

In fact, psychopaths figure prominently in his moral analysis. But how does he know that psychopaths don't instantiate necessary moral truths? Is he just taking a headcount?