The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of moral psychology.  Haidt thinks that human moral thinking is biologically rooted in modules in the brain which orient us to be concerned with 5 basic kinds of priorities, (1) fairness/reciprocity, (2) diminishment of general suffering, (3) in-group loyalty, (4) respect for hierarchy, and (5) concern for purity or sanctity. Haidt argues that liberals around the world tend to think morality only encompasses the first two modules’ concerns, whereas conservatives tend to think morality encompasses all the modules’ concerns.  (I’ve previously explored Haidt’s ideas and their implications for moral philosophy here, here, and here.)

Goldstein and Greta Christina want to argue that since liberals are primarily concerned with fairness and the avoidance of harm, their basic priorities are more in-synch with what normative moral thinking, which requires principles of universalization, require of us. And, secondly, Greta Christina argues that liberal values have advanced all sorts of moral progress, such as the eradication of slavery and the creation of rights for women and other traditionally subordinated classes, where conservative value priorities inherently inclined people towards preserving such things.

Below is David’s reply to the Goldstein/Greta Christina defense of the intrinsic and historical superiority of liberal values, followed by my own further thoughts on the topic.

Dan,

I am unpersuaded by Goldstein’s argument.

I take it that the universalizability of moral principles entails two things.

1. All valid moral principles must apply to all people, and all actions.

2. persons situated the same way in all morally relevant ways must be treated the same.

It does not entail that the application of moral principles will be identical in all respects. In fact the universalizablity requirement requires that moral principles be stated at a level of generality that abstracts from features of situations that lead to differences in application of the principles (that’s why “help old ladies across the street” is not a universal moral principle, while there might be a more abstract, general principle which yields the requirement that certain people should help certain old ladies across certain streets). Or the principle must specify certain conditions that must be met before the requirement applies (e.g., in the case of helping old ladies, one must be able bodied oneself. This would be universal, but conditional (For all x, if x is able bodied and…then one must…))

Golden rules formulate that it is wrong to exempt ourselves from principles for irrelevant reasons. So rich people can’t exempt themselves from requirements simply because they are rich.

But holders of conservative values view matters of purity, etc. as morally relevant. Goldstein has offered no argument that requirements of purity etc. cannot be enforced impartially, impartially meaning that people aren’t exempted from the requirements for irrelevant reasons. And of course attempts to do so with no moral resources except a criterion of universalizability run the risk of being question begging. And that I take it is because the real dispute is about what matters are morally relevant and important.

My take, for what it is worth, is that the problem with politcal conservatives is that they often hold to values in the absence of any intelligible account of why and how those values are morally relevant. That is why their invocation of such values is arbitrary (and hence not impartial, universalizable). But the same charge often applies to the political left’s invocations of fair treatment.

Yes, David, there is something question-begging indeed about simply prioritizing the universalization criteria by the Golden Rule standard when universalization is (a) one of the 5 “competing” modules you are comparing in the first place and (b) compatible with the other three modules on conceptions that treat those module’s primary concerns as matters of intrinsic moral value priority—a priority to such an intrinsic extent that it is capable of trumping other goods, even goods which are typically moral priorities on other occasions in which they do not conflict with other modules’ priorities.  Happiness might be a good that is normally encouragable, but if loyalty, purity, and hierarchical respect are intrinsic moral values they might each be understood to trump the option of increased happiness in every case in which it conflicts with one of them.  (Though I personally disagree with this interpretation of moral priority.)

To expand on your own examples, David: (1) there are clearly universalized rules within hierarchies (e.g., for any x, such that x is in position y in the hierarchy, it is fair for x to be treated in way z), which when applied consistently are seen as entirely fair by those who accept the hierarchies as valid arrangements, (2) there are clearly universalizable rules for loyalty, whereby I accept that I will work for the interest of those who belong to my group and you will work for the interest of those who belong to your group and we will simply be rivals (even enemies) and not morally blame one another for that but accept it as perfectly morally valid for each to act as the other’s rival or enemy.    This could be a mutually respected hatred of one another without the pretense of moral condemnation of either one by the other one.  Usually, in practice, inter-group hatreds see one or both groups rationalizing themselves as moral superior and conceiving of the Other group as having inferior, or outright evil, values.

But nonetheless in many areas of life that involve rivalries we find the acknowledgement that there is nothing wrong with each group looking after itself, even at the material expense of members of the out-group, as long as some generally agreed upon thresholds of inter-familial, inter-tribal, or international fairness is at least met.  It might usually be a much lower standard of cross-group cooperation than liberals want but it exists nonetheless.   So, it might be fair to kill for your family, your tribe, or your nation, but, say, not to kill when it’s not a matter of necessity or not to resort to chemical weapons, etc.

Where I become sympathetic with the Goldstein/Greta Christina position and where I think it might be reformulated in a non-question-begging way is if we reassess values according to their contributions to human flourishing.   Haidt himself, in advocating a non-dismissive attitude towards more closed and conservative cultures, appeals to the proven survival value of these moral mentalities.   Haidt’s argument, put simply, is that we cannot categorically disparage ways of thinking that were naturally selected over the course of many millennia of human life by their the powerful effectiveness of their abilities to unite people against threats both intra-communal and inter-communal and both social and natural.

If we are to think evolutionarily at all, in the first place, we are thinking teleologically. Of course, by this I do not mean that we are looking for any ideal purposes deliberately programmed for all our traits by an intelligent being with explicitly thought out intentions for them.  What I mean in saying that evolutionary thinking is teleological is that it tries to reason about what de facto functionality any given trait might have that could explain why it gave its bearers such a decisive advantage over their rivals within their species such that it became a necessary component of all members of that species (at least for a given period in which it ascended and normalized).

So, in this way, evolutionary thinking is a wholly naturalistic but nonetheless teleological form of thinking.   Not only do evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and philosophers treat the question, “what purpose does this serve?” as a meaningful one, but they typically treat it as the most essential and definitive one for defining traits.

I think the one mistake many evolutionary thinkers is to loosely refer to a trait’s contribution to reproductive success as though it were its only or its primary function in cases where traits have intrinsic functions which are more basic to their actual essential functioning on their own terms (independently of the evolutionary conditions that brought them about in the first place or made it so they stayed around).

Having sketched briefly how evolutionary thinkers are naturalistically and functionalistically teleological, we can return to Jonathan Haidt’s concerns.  Haidt seems to think at least that we must tailor our moral arguments, regardless of their objective categories of justification, to the modules by which different people make moral judgments.  If conservatives think with all five modules and, so, see the priorities each module takes seriously as equally (or relatively equally) important, then regardless of what I personally think of the moral relevance of purity or loyalty or hierarchy, I had better explain how my moral viewpoint addresses the conservatives concerns about these areas of life or they are simply going to dismiss me as morally obtuse, immoral, or amoral.  I ignore the nature of my conservative interlocutor’s biologically conditioned moral priorities at the cost of my own futility in attempts to persuade her to agree with me in my bottom line moral conclusions about good and bad actions.

But more than simply advising liberals to be more sensitive to their audience if they are to persuade conservative-minded people and to include appeals that will reach them or assuage their wider array of concerns, Haidt seems to want to stress to liberals how important the “conservative” moral modules must have been in evolutionary terms in helping our ancestors survive for millennia amidst unbelievable pressures, both natural and social, and both intracommunal and intercommunal.

Despite his liberal temperament, biography, profession, and atheism, Haidt’s theoretical conclusions seem to lead him to the sort of classic teleological conservatism that mistrusts attempts to treat humanity as malleable and perfectable through reason and social institutions that promote autonomy and compassion alone.  Like many conservatives he sees human nature as having certain socially resistant biological tendencies and that he seems to suspect that at least some traditional categories have been successful enough in wrangling human nature that their wisdom, proved to us by the brute fact of their success in making for the survival and relative flourishing of past generations, must not be cavalierly dismissed.  Like conservatives, I think Haidt worries about hastily changing systems which we do not fully understand, which both naturally and culturally evolved to be certain ways because they balanced important priorities in intricately complex and ultimately successful ways.

We may think we can “fix” one part, say tribal loyalty which seems to cause us more trouble than it’s worth, by downgrading it from a “moral” priority where it  is allowed sometimes to override our empathy for those in suffering or to condition our understanding of what is fair in terms of preferences to the in-group alone in some cases.  But how do we know a priori that the conservative is wrong and that tribal loyalty is not actually morally better in some cases in which it will hurt others in the short term?  How do we know that it is in principle never more fair to manifest tribal loyalty than to manifest universalistic impartiality?   If the traits we have evolved are so impressively efficient at advancing civilization to where it is, with soaring populations and steadily expanding technological and cultural innovations, is it really wise to tinker with the delicate balance of elements that contribute to human thinking as we have inherited it?

Sure, we might in the short term remedy some forms of suffering but how do we know that we are not risking greater ones down the road?   The conservative order might cause some people some obviously recognizable miseries, but if the order is dismantled that might mean greater misery for all in the long run.  And sure there may be some features of our lives which are unfair by standards of impartiality, but possibly we would suffer worse unfairness in the long run if the bulwarks of hierarchy and loyalty were not generally firm.  Maybe hierarchy and loyalty are, ironically, in a necessary psychological symbiosis with impartiality and that in their collapse in moral priority, people’s impartiality would collapse as well as selfishness took up more and more of the psyche.  Do we really know enough about whether any of these psychological components can genuinely function outside of their dialectical interconnections with each other by which they might mutually define, inform, support, and check each other?

I think Haidt has a burgeoning conservative consciousness which points in the direction of considerations such as these and which places him surprisingly close to conservative teleologists of both religious and political inspiration who alike think that human nature’s malleability and perfectability through institutions must not be overestimated and that the traditional mechanisms for coordinating human tendencies towards productive endeavors must not be treated with contempt but respected and understood before being radically tampered with.

I think that the case that Goldstein and Greta Christina need to make in order to counter this sort of defense of conservatism about values is that both the moral modules are themselves and the goals they prioritize are primarily instrumental goods, rather than inviolably intrinsic goods.   In other words, Goldstein and Greta Christina need to trump up the same instrumental dimension of teleological goods that Haidt implicitly does when defending the conservative modules for their contribution to humanity’s biological and cultural successes.

Ultimately, any module must be assessable in terms of whether or not it succeeds, minimally, in propagating the species to as many further generations as possible and, maximally, in creating human beings who flourish the very most according to the very most different measures of human prosperity.   This is why, ultimately, I am an indirect consequentialist who thinks that the good to be maximized is human beings who maximally function according to the maximum possible number of the functions that are most characteristic and definitive of human nature.  I see each individual human, as well as each grouping of us, as essentially constituted of hierarchical networks of functions, which when all functioning together amount to a single human being or human group.   We are the sum of our various functionalities and we thrive in what we are to the degree that we maximally function in our collective powers.  Our individual powers themselves are nothing but functionalities and the inherent good for each power therefore is to function according to its capability through which it is instantiated as such a power at all.

So, I take the best argument for apologists for liberal values to be that history has shown that when people have to a greater extent rearranged the hierarchy of moral priorities to place at the top the avoidance of harm and a sort of highly formalistic universalism, which treats all humans as the most similar and the most entitled to the same rights and opportunities as practically feasible, and to place at the bottom, concerns for the in-group, hierarchies, and purity, the outcome has been more success in the attainment of flourishing goods.

So, for example, when loyalty is not allowed to trump freedom of opportunity for all persons regardless of where they come from, one lets a natural competition create efficient workers rather than allowing a nepotism that makes for worse workers. This contributes to overall material prosperity, helps grow intrinsic virtuous powers of industriousness, etc.   Similarly, extending one’s sense of social contract and mutual interdependence outside one’s tribe winds up removing the threat of war and increasing the prosperity through combining the efforts of more people in the same cooperative endeavor.  As both Hobbes and the prisoner’s dilemma teach us, it is on the long run more productive to sacrifice some of what we desire for ourselves for the sake of having a cooperative friend in the Other, rather than a threatening enemy. We don’t waste energy protecting against the Other as enemy that can be redirected into a mutually advantageous endeavor instead and we remove the risk of loss to the Other.  This same principle which works on the level of individual humans relating to each other such as to form an implicit social contract is also operative between individual human groups relating to each other such as to make possible international community according to an implicit social contract.  These sorts of considerations, and a historical record in which mutual interdependency forestalls war and peace leads to prosperity, all weigh in favor of preventing the sorts of principled loyalty considerations that might threaten full cross-border cooperation to be taken as morally legitimate.

One can, of course, argue that Western civilization has not at all thrived by abandoning its conservatism but rather by economically widening the scope of its empire and by downplaying its conservatism only within the borders of that empire, while doubling down on its conservatism towards its Third World Other.   One can argue that Western peace and permissiveness rely on Western prosperity, which in turn materially depends on Western nations’ tribal, militaristic and capitalistic rape of the out-group Third World for resources.   Peace follows prosperity. Western liberality and permissiveness is to a significant extent a function of its wealth, possibly as much as it is the cause of it.   Times of intra-communal desperation generally become more conservative times, intra-communally, in which order (which usually means strict concern for hierarchy, loyalty, and purity) become paramount and trump abstract concerns for fairness and concern for pleasure and the avoidance of suffering at all costs.

Now, if Western prosperity allows for intra-communal moral permissiveness on 3 out of 5 modules, but Western prosperity depends on a tribalistic capitalism which necessarily involves the implicit dehumanization and indifferent exploitatation of the Third World Other, then the question is whether liberal values are really responsible for the advance of internally peaceful civilization or whether liberal hypocrisy is.

It is, of course, at least theoretically possible that prosperity is not ultimately a zero-sum game and that the whole world can flourish some day without any dehumanizing levels of wealth disparity, and that this worldwide maximization of peace, prosperity, and equality will be achieved by the prioitization of liberal moral values as paramount and the relegation of conservative moral values to supporting roles.   But the devil’s advocate within me think this remains to be proven in practice before I will let the liberal in me get triumphalistic about it.

Your Thoughts?

Now Wright is challenging Coyne’s reading of The Evolution of God, providing textual excerpts which he claims show his positions on religion’s mixed blessings to be much more in line with those Coyne’s own.  Rather than refuting him, Wright argues that Coyne offers insights already accounted for within the book itself.  In reply to Coyne’s claim that Wright thinks religious and moral history has been “driven by God,” Wright cites The Evolution of God (pages 448 and 401):

This book’s account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account. We’ve explained the expansion of the moral imagination as an outgrowth of expanding social organization, which is itself an outgrowth of technological evolution, which itself grows naturally out of the human brain, which itself grew naturally out of the primordial ooze via biological evolution. There’s no mystical force that has to enter the system to explain this, and there’s no need to look for one.”

We can explain the complex functionality of organisms without positing a god. The explanation is natural selection.

And against the claim that Wright had argued that monotheism was inherently a morally improving innovation over polytheism, Wright quotes pg. 173 where he rebufs the idea that in its origins monotheism’s universalism was a moral kind:

If you look at the earliest biblical texts that plainly declare the arrival of monotheism and you ask which of their various sentiments seems to most directly motivate that declaration, the answer would seem closer to hatred than to love, closer to retribution than to compassion. To the extent that we can tell, the one true God—the God of Jews, then of Christians, and then of Muslims—was originally a god of vengeance.

Wright points to passages in The Evolution of God where he notes that Paul’s gesture of wider moral inclusion beyond ethnic barriers still did not translate into love and tolerance outside of his religion and then he shows his text’s acknowledgments of the violent strands of the Koran and its interpretation.  Which then brings us to what Wright says he really thinks about whether religion is either inevitably or indispensably an aid to moral progress:

Which raises the question of what I do believe about moral progress. Well, (1) I’m only talking about progress along one dimension—a growing circle of moral inclusion, even across ethnic and national bounds, that is visible in most places across millennia, though not necessarily across decades or even centuries. This is the progress that Peter Singer documented in his book The Expanding Circle, that Steven Pinker has noted and theorized about, and that many other thinkers acknowledge as well. (2) Unlike Singer, I’m attributing this expanding circle mainly to the expansion of social organization—in particular, to the growing scope of “non-zero-sumness” or interdependence. (3) Though I argue in this book that all three Abrahamic religions have shown a responsiveness to these dynamics—that is, they generally get more tolerant, less belligerent, in response to non-zero-sum dynamics—I emphasize that there’s no guarantee that, as social organization approaches the global level, humankind will make the necessary moral adaptation; we may instead see social chaos on an unprecedented scale.

I don’t argue that religious belief is a pre-requisite for this moral progress; atheists are presumably just as responsive to the underlying dynamic as believers. The values system in question—religious or secular—is a kind of “neutral medium” through which underlying social dynamics find their moral manifestation.

I find myself very sympathetic to Wright’s narrower thesis as here presented.  As can be seen throughout my argument for gay marriage, and in my discussion of the psychological challenge of inculcating visceral concern for world poverty in people, I also view moral progress in terms of the struggle to further widen our circles of inclusion.  I see the struggle as being against evolutionary conditioning from primeval times in which tribal loyalty and extra-tribal hostility were more necessary aids to preservation.  I view our greatest moral struggles to be ones of overcoming group-based belligerence.  And, like Coyne and Wright, I do not think any divine agency guarantees progress or think that whatever progress has already been achieved has happened in either a linear or a constant fashion.

As a committed secularist, I am happy to point out religion’s complicity with numerous instances of regression into tribalism throughout history.  But also I take Wright’s frequent warnings that it is naive in most cases to argue as though religion leads to conflict and exclusivism all by itself, in a political and social vacuum—as though only removing religion could either prevent or end all conflicts which presently have religious dimensions.  Real world politics is always more complicated than that and not all human conflict can be blamed only on religion.

Nonetheless, I think a case can be made that while religion is not solely responsible for all the conflicts in which it plays a part and while it can be more and less inclusive and adaptable, religious and secular values systems are not merely “neutral media” through which moral progress can work.  There are aspects of religion which inherently oppose the expansion of inclusiveness and aspects of secularism which inherently incline against exclusivity.    Valuing religiosity itself entails valuing certain values that are in conflict with wide inclusiveness  insofar as religiosity depends on establishing highly specified faith traditions.  This is because specific faith traditions inevitably need to demarcate themselves from other traditions, creating an incentive for exclusivity.  They also depend for their substance, as specific faith traditions on shared rituals and symbols which inevitably exclude those outside their particular faith bonds.  So far these things are of themselves of course just inevitable features of the ineradicably human practice of forming groups.  But what makes them problematic in the case of religions is that they are tied to a commitment to value rationally unjustifiable claims in the form of beliefs taken on faith alone.

Insofar as religions praise this practice of holding intellectual positions for which outsiders may not demand any adequate defense, religions insulate themselves (and their members) from full criticism from the outside.  And insofar as religions inculcate these beliefs that admit of no possible proof on purely rational grounds, they give their faithful believers many dogmatic claims about the world and morality by which to judge circumstances and other people in ways that those outside the faith would have no theoretical reason to accept.   This inevitably leads serious religious believers who take their faith’s propositions to heart doomed to perpetual conflicts with their neighbors from different traditions.

This is most problematic of course when political decisions are negotiated with one or more parties advocating theologically influenced positions that cannot be acceptable to those outside the tradition.  But it is not only on the political level that a great deal of intractable moral and intellectual angst and frustration is expended in conflicts between believers from competing traditions and between believers and non-believers.  These are disagreements are distinguishable from other protracted intellectual, moral, political, and social disputes which at least admit of theoretical resolution since disputes which involve faith beliefs are inherently irresolvable by reason.

By contrast, while secularism can surely be wedded to similarly closed-minded habits of thought, it does not inherently praise faith in unfounded beliefs as an ideal the way that religion does.  Secularism is inherently more likely to lead to rationalism since the secularist, by definition, identifies himself in a cosmopolitan way, as secular, as part of the world rather than narrowly as part of a specific tradition (which identification is usually epitomized by his faith identification).

Rationalism and fideism are not equally neutral mediums for the values of inclusiveness.  Rationalism inherently includes all rational beings when it demands we always give reasons to each other and demand reasons from each other.  If reason alone is to be the judge of opinions (insofar as “reason alone” is a practically realizable ideal, of course), then they are in principle laid open to the judgment of all rational beings who are adequately qualified to judge them.  If faith is permitted to judge the truth of a given tradition’s opinions then those viewpoints can theoretically be adequately assessed only by that tradition’s faithful and they are beyond the criticism of both the faithless and those faithful to a different set of competing dogmas.

It is true that a particular faith can interpret itself in a way that minimizes hostilities towards neighboring states and faiths and Wright’s case that faiths do precisely this when it is in their practical interests is both extremely intriguing and hope inducing.  But this does not mean that this is the most ideal or efficient way to persuade people towards inclusivity.  When trying to persuade a faith tradition to become more inclusive, you have to use far more than rational appeals to morality and self-interest but you often have to contort that tradition’s holy texts and other authorities in numerous places to show how the change can be interpreted as “the true meaning of the faith.”  This usually involves a whole lot of hermeneutically disingenuous whitewashing of the complicated history that Wright knows really comprise religious traditions.  This is a tedious and uncertain task which could very well fail in any particular case and it’s not an obstacle when dealing with rationalistic traditions.

For Wright’s insights to be effective and persuade normal believers, they have to be able to ignore or downplay the significance of their traditions’ dark sides to which he honestly calls our attention.  They cannot admit that they are adopting a moral standard of increasing inclusiveness that is defensible separately from their traditions and is the best means for evaluating their goodness and badness throughout history.  For the religious person, the faith has to in some significant way be itself an indispensable source of moral guidance or why bother with it?  If all it is going to do is follow the guidance of secular moral reasoning, why not just go ahead and become a rationalistic secularist and ditch the pretense to having a revealed faith by which God guides your group specially?

Rationalists, by contrast, are in principle free to change their minds and admit that their previous habits of moral judgments were erroneous or that their traditions are flawed.  Of course, even rationalists have strong  traditionalist ties too (such as to the Enlightenment and to ideals like equality, human rights, etc.) but they are all revisable in a far more self-aware way than faith traditions allow as a rule.  Rationalism makes opposition to dogma its highest duty and so introspects its own dogmas where faith traditions are constantly trying to safeguard theirs and to compromise only under severe practical pressure and always while trying to save face that the tradition was always essentially correct.

As long as there are human beings, there will be human groups, and as long as there are human groups there will be degrees of exclusivity towards those who are outside our groups.  Or at least there will always be a tendency to prefer our narrower circles to our wider ones as we are encompassed by wider concentric group circles.  No matter how cosmopolitan we can get ourselves to become, no matter whether we can eventually even ingrain in ourselves genuine fellow feeling for humanity at large and get to the point where we have no group of Others whatsoever whom we hate or dehumanize—we will likely always still prefer our family and friends over our colleagues, our colleagues over mere acquaintances, acquaintances over strange fellow countrymen, our fellow countrymen over others in our particular geographical alliance, etc.  on outward to the whole human race taken as one large group with which we identify.  In other words, even if we maximally diminish the human mind’s tendency to judge according to in-group/out-group dichotomies, we will likelystill rank our preferences and retain stronger group identities in our narrower circles than in our wider ones.

The problem with religion is that by introducing the irrationalism of faith, as an over the top means of inculcating allegiance to tradition, it makes it harder for people to see their local group as one that is only a subset of larger group identification.  It makes people feel like the religious grouping is the ultimate and absolute one.  Even where within this grouping people can be persuaded to inclusive attitudes and to thinking in inclusive categories, the presence of faith and rationally unquestionable beliefs inherently resists that process.

All that said, in a world in which it is unlikely for religious institutions to collapse altogether in the near future, I think it is admirable for moderates within them to participate in the tugs of war within their faith traditions in such a way as to pull their traditions’ centers further towards rationalism and moral inclusiveness.  I think that Wright’s thesis has potential for laying out an effective game-plan for those engaged in real world politics who need pragmatic strategies for figuing out how to turn religion into an ally of world peace on its own terms.

But, my own concern is with the longer game, the bigger tugs of war between rationalism and irrationalism, progressivism and traditionalism, reason and faith, freedom of thought and practice and authoriatianism of thought and practice.  Ultimately, what the religious moderates want to achieve from within religion will not be enough.  It’s a strategy for working with the realities of the problem of humanity’s attachment to faith insofar as it persists.  And it’s a strategy which for the time being helps perpetuate religion with all its latent authoritarianism and irrationalism, which could resurface in extremist forms at almost any time.

So, I side with those working to make stronger gains for rationalism and inclusiveness by confronting religion’s irrationalism and authoritarianism head on in an attempt to persuade those who can abandon faith to do so and to eliminate all the extra obstacles to universalist thinking that its narrowness inherently puts up.  Will that make religion feel threatened and make its extremist manifestations more likely as counter-reactions?  In some cases, of course this has happened and will continue to happen.  The most evil and closed-minded dimensions of religion are going to be threatened by direct confrontations with moral progressiveness, secularism, and rationalism that threaten their hegemony.  But when religions do lash out violently, they also lose moral and intellectual credibility with those in the middle and, hopefully, religious moderates become more vigilant against the seeds of irrationalism and violence in their traditions.  And when confronted by strong atheist, secularist, rationalist demands for moral and intellectual explanation, the moderates are challenged to liberalize their traditions as much as possible in order to justifiably persist in them.

So, for these reasons, while I understand Wright’s pragmatic reasons for calling for a view of religion as more capable of increasing inclusivness on its own terms and I understand that in real world political terms this is the shrewdest path to moral and political progress, I still support and will continue to engage in the parallel project of calling out irrationalism and moral authoritarianism out for their inherent problems.

Or put most simply—we can either work with people’s prejudices or we can denounce the propensities to prejudice altogether.  While the former solution is a necessary compromise in some cases where the prejudices are impossible to change in an allotted timeframe in which there are other goals at stake, there is also a vital charge that as many of us as possible also pursue the latter, more fundamental goal of removing praise for unjustified, prejudicial beliefs altogether, even those with the long honored name of “faith.”

Your Thoughts?

The ideal of unconditional love strikes many as the purest, most ideal way to define the essence of love.  It is easy to see why this characterization of the essence of love is appealing.  Unconditional love is an undiluted love—if I love only the good in you but do not love the bad in you, then I do not entirely love you in the sense that I do not love the entirety of what you do or the entirety of what you are (insofar as what you do which I do not love expresses some aspects of you which I do not love).

But this causes conceptual puzzles for the unconditional lover.  Either the unconditional lover must love what is bad whenever the object of his love is bad in some way or the unconditional lover must distinguish the beloved from the beloved’s own actions, thoughts, dispositions of character whenever they are bad, etc., such that the unconditional lover does not love the manifestations of the beloved in the beloved’s thoughts and behavior (at least in those cases) but rather loves some other thing about the beloved.

And not only does the unconditional lover who rejects bad things love the beloved in some way that eludes all the beloved’s faults, but the lover must love the beloved unconditionally. Further this means that the lover cannot even love the beloved for the good in the beloved.  The lover theoretically should love those good things about the beloved but cannot base an unconditional love of the other, in whole or in part, on the presence of those good things. 

So, I cannot unconditionally love you because you are funny or smart or beautiful or virtuous or affectionate to me.  I can love your sense of humor, intelligence, beauty, virtue, and enjoy your affection but can neither love you through my love for these traits nor on account of them.  This means that when I enjoy your sense of humor, I am not loving you through that sense of humor (because that would be a condition for my love) but I am only loving humor itself and you only insofar as you are a conduit of humor to me.  It also means that loving your intellectual stimulation, beauty, virtue, etc. are all instances of loving these lovable things and you as a being that gives me occasion to see them and delight in their manifestations.  But if I love you unconditionally, I cannot mix up my love of these things into my love or my love becomes partly conditional and not wholly unconditional.

This would lead to the unhappy paradox in which the most ideal love of another makes no reference whatsoever to anything desirable about them or their actions, lest it become conditional and therein non-ideal love.  And on the receiving end of love I would be in the paradoxical position of knowing that to be truly loved by someone would mean not being loved for being desirable in any way.  This would mean that whenever someone loved me, to be sure of his or her love I would have to confirm that they did not really love my intelligence, beauty, virtue, affection towards them, etc.  I would have to confirm that they loved me irrespective of the delightfulness of any of my desirable properties and independent of any of the benefits of my company and partnership for them.

But what is left of me if you strip away every property I have?  Actually considering me without them seems unintelligible so you apprehend me with unconditional love you must be thinking of my properties and desiring them but not the good within them.  So, in some curious fashion you must behold, for example, virtue x that I have and love the virtue but not because it is a virtue and thus desirable but simply because it is a thing about me.  And similarly to love me unconditionally would mean to love my vices, beholding them and loving them simply as properties of me and not as inherently desirable or loved on account of any discerned desirability.

But is there any delight to me in being loved not for anything I do or am that makes me desirable?  Do I really want you to love my virtues but not what is desirable in them?  Is not a central good of being loved the reaffirmation of one’s own desirableness in one’s own character or actions?  This seems to strip the good of being loved of one of it’s primary sources of value to us—the reaffirmation of our worth to us by another.

Some benefits of being loved do remain nonetheless.  Since you unconditionally love me I take it that you will always benefit me with no demands for compensation and you will always benefit me regardless of my negative qualities, my negative actions, and, even, my negative attitude and/or actions aimed at you yourself.  There is something profoundly comforting about the idea of being loved no less regardless of one’s vices or personal failures.  Psychologically this could be an enormous relief from all the pressures of obligation and responsibility and all our deepest fears of abandonment.

There is a further problem for unconditional love and that is that more than just an undiluted love, strictly speaking we would have to recognize it as an arbitrary love.  I cannot love you because you are my family member because that’s a qualifying condition, nor because we are friends who enjoy each other’s company, and in the case of the many Christian notions of God’s unconditional love there is a fundamental contradiction between the ideal of unconditional love and the condition of acceptance of God’s love to receive it.  Unconditional love cannot demand that it be accepted in order to be given because that would thereby make it conditional love.

This is an essential reason for the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional grace which claims that God does not actually leave it up to the objects of his love to reject his love but he saves them in spite of the fact that their wills are turned against him.  He changes their wills and hearts and saves them for them.  There is no condition of acceptance of this process except the acceptance that happens in one’s mind upon being saved—which is itself the gift of grace (and not prior to its bestowal).

The ugly flipside of this doctrine of unconditional grace, of course, is unconditional damnation by which God predestines the those who refuse his grace to eternal damnation from the start.  It is impossible for them to come to his unconditional love on their own because the curse of Adam determines that their wills are set against God.  Now, one might argue that if we take out the doctrine of Original Sin or interpret it in such a way as to preclude the will voluntarily assenting to be saved.  In that case the damned are not damned by God’s will but by their own refusal to accept his unconditional love. But the problem then is again a problem of the meaning of unconditional love.  If God loves them unconditionally then he cannot refuse them on the condition that they do not accept his love.

So, therefore, God either unconditionally loves everyone and therefore saves everyone, as universalists claim, or God only unconditionally loves some and saves only them as the Calvinists claim and he unconditionally damns the others.  If God’s love is unconditional then it is inherently capricious.  It arbitrarily chooses its beloveds with no reference to their relative goodness and it arbitrarily rejects all others with no consideration made of their own goodness or even their badness since, being unconditional love, God only loves and withholds love without conditions.

And, again, this is not just a problem for God but for us too as unconditional lovers.  It is arbitrary whenever we choose to unconditionally love.  When I select you for unconditional love, I must do this out of no special goodness you have, nor out of any special relationship you have to me or else it is conditional.  If I chose you as an object of my love (whether deliberately or without thinking) fundamentally because you were my child, then I did not love you unconditionally but in response to a condition—our relationship of father and child.

This also goes for friends I choose to unconditionally love and subjects of my desire to aid humanity generally.  If I decide I want to aid the poor, teach the uneducated, companion the shut-in, etc. then each of these people are chosen as subjects of my benevolence due to their conditions—they are poor, uneducated, isolated, etc.  To love unconditionally means that I might as randomly choose to show up on the doorstep of a multi-billionaire offering benefits as I am to show up in a refugee camp or to my child’s room.  Completely unconditional love must select its objects without conditions and stand at random doors whenever it knocks.  Quite possibly, it may even need to knock on every door and be a universal love if once having selected a particular subject of love as its beloved this made its love henceforth conditioned on one’s being the chosen beloved.

Unconditional love could choose Person A over Person B randomly as its beloved, with no reference to any conditioning considerations about A or B, but then once it starts loving A unconditionally but not B because of a choice it has made then its further acts of love are all conditioned on its prior choice and therefore it’s not an unconditioned love.  So, an unconditional love must be a universal love (and in the case of God, an unconditionally loving God must logically be a universally loving God and, so, even the Calvinists’ logic comes up a step short when it posits that God damns anyone).

So, unconditional love requires that we love everyone (and maybe even everything) with no reference to any desirability of the objects of our love.  They may have some desirable features, but we must love the objects of our love either through the desirability of those desirable features nor on account of them.  We must love those features only insofar as they are the manifestations of that which we love but not because of the ways in which they are lovable.

So, in light of these considerations, I cannot unconditionally love anyone or anything unless I also unconditionally love everyone and everything.  It also seems evident that none of us unconditionally loves everyone and everything.  Therefore, none of us unconditionally loves anyone or anything.  Unconditional love does not exist.  Maybe, if God exists, there is unconditional love in God but to know that would require knowing that God exists, that God is a type of being capable of loving, and that God happens to love all things equally and in all other ways unconditionally.  Each of these propositions would require a distinct (and distinctly difficult) demonstration it seems to me before we could rationally affirm any of them.

Assuming for the moment that there were some way to know these three things were true, could we unconditionally love because of the grace of God?  It is theoretically possible that a wholly new psychologically inclined human were to exist who did love everyone and everything indiscriminately and unreservedly but I know of no record of such a strange creatures ever existing.  Therefore, the hypothesis that God gives “the redeemed” powers of unconditional love seems simply refuted in experience (unless he has not yet redeemed anyone and will only do that at some future date.  But then this leads us back to famous reasons for suspecting that there is not an omnipotent unconditionally loving God since it has not actually bestowed its love evenly or even as much as it could.  But we’ll bracket such discussion for treatments of the problem of evil itself.)

In the next post (or maybe several if I’m prompted by good comments or otherwise come to have further thoughts) I will try to cash out other possible meanings or applications of the unconditional love ideal to see if the concept is redeemable or at least if there are related ideals which sufficiently do the work we usually expect the unconditional love ideal to do in leading us to highly valued ethical goals.  There may be value in exploring the different implications of different kinds of love—friendship, erotic, romantic, familial, parental, altruistic, etc.  Also love itself may be split into a range of distinct things—affection, desire, admiration, commitment, attachment, beneficence, or various combinations of such traits, attitudes, actions, apprehensions, and feelings.  Maybe all love is conditioned by relationships between lovers and their beloveds but within the condition that there is a love bond, there can be something we call unconditional in certain manners of feeling, acting, or being.

But these are hypotheses I have attempted to work out in the next post. See also my recommendation that we just call what we now refer to as “unconditional love” volitional love instead.

In the meantime, I would greatly appreciate Your Thoughts.