The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 35

Aaron and I ended up recording for over two hours, so I divided that recording into two episodes.  This is part one.  In this episode, Aaron and I give brief updates on our lives and Aaron talks about some interesting things he's learned from Dr. Hellerman about the ancient world's and early church's view on poverty and homelessness and how that applies to today.

Listen to the episode here.

To learn how to support our show, click here.

Books Mentioned in the Episode

Early Christian Care for the Poor by K.C. Richardson.

The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.

Them: Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal by Ben Sasse.

12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson.

You are Not Your Brain by Jeffrey Schwartz and Rebecca Gladding.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 32

Aaron and Kyle talk about some recent controversies surrounding the famous preacher and apologist, Ravi Zacharias, and his academic credentials and experiences.

Listen to the episode here.

Click here for the article by Randal Rauser.

To learn how to support our show, click here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 29

Kyle interviews Neal Hardin on Assembly Bill 2943 in California and sexual orientation change therapy.  This is a bill being passed around in California, but listeners who are not citizens of California should care about this topic because of the freedoms it could affect.  We talk about what the bill says, Neal's concerns with the bill, and the nuances of orientation change therapy.

Listen to the episode here.

For more from Neal Hardin, check out his website.

To learn how to support the show, click here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 26

Timothy Hsiao, a philosophy teacher at Grantham University and Ph.D candidate in philosophy at the University of Reading, returns to talk about gun rights.  Hsiao argues for a more permissive view of gun rights and ownership and criticizes arguments for more gun restrictions.

Listen to the episode here.

For Hsiao's papers on the subject of guns, check out his website.

For my first interview with him, click here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 25

In this episode, I interviewed Tim Hsiao, professor of philosophy at Grantham University and Ph.D candidate at the University of Reading, on the natural law theory of ethics.  What is natural law theory?  What are the arguments for and against it?  What does natural law theory say about the ethics of sex, lying, drug use, and other things?  How is God involved in natural law theory?  Check it out.

Listen to the episode here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 22

Aaron and I, prompted by an article on Quillette, talk about transgenderism and philosophy of mind issues.  This is part 1 of this topic.  We will get more into the metaphysics of mind in part 2.

Listen to the episode here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 21

I interview Dennis Bray, a Ph.D candidate in analytic theology at the University of St. Andrews, on the metaphysics of beauty.  Is beauty objective?  Why think it is?  How does the topic of beauty relate to the topic of goodness and morality?  What is God's connection to beauty and its objectivity?  What is an argument for God's existence from beauty?  All that and more here.

Listen to the episode here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 16

Aaron and I discuss whether or not a sin like adultery should automatically mean that someone is not fit to be a leader of the country, why we named our podcast AK47, and some updates on future interviews.  Aaron also does a Woody Allen voice.

Listen to the episode here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 13

Aaron and I talk about sports, what defines a sport, whether or not sports are immoral, and I tell a cringy story and mess around.

Listen to the episode here.

The AK47 Podcast Season 1: Episode 11

Aaron and I interview Clinton Wilcox on abortion.  What are the arguments for the pro-life position?  Why should we listen to a man's opinion?  Do abortion laws affect abortion rates?  Are pro-lifers just pro-birth?  Does a woman's bodily autonomy justify abortion in some cases?  Listen to find out.

Listen to the interview here.

For more from Clinton Wilcox, check out his blog, his Twitter, and check out the Life Training Institute for more pro-life apologetics.

Abortion and the Death Penalty

This article was originally featured on ResistanceTV.

I recently published a post on Twitter and Facebook that went something like this:

People often claim that pro-lifers are being inconsistent for being against abortion, but supportive of the death penalty.  Not everyone who is against abortion is for the death penalty, of course, but some are.  It is not clear to me, however, what the inconsistency is, because people usually don't explain what it is.  Here is my best attempt at two propositions that anti-abortion, pro-death penalty people believe:

1. It is never justified to take the life of a human being that is innocent of any wrongdoing.

2. It is sometimes justified to take the life of a human being that is guilty of wrongdoing. 

What, exactly, is inconsistent about believing these two propositions?  Keep in mind that I'm not asking if (1) or (2) are true, I'm asking what is inconsistent about believing them both.

I posted this because I frequently see people accuse pro-lifers of being inconsistent in being against abortion, but in favor of the death penalty.  This objection can come from pro-choice people who want to criticize pro-lifers for being hypocrites and it can come from pro-lifers who believe that the “pro-life” label can only apply to people who are against both abortion and the death penalty.

It is not clear to me what the inconsistency is, so I posted this tweet to see what people would say.  I was not asking if the anti-abortion or pro-death penalty viewpoints were right or true.  I was asking if a person is being intellectually inconsistent by being anti-abortion and pro-death penalty.  I am also aware that not all people who are anti-abortion are pro-death penalty.  The question is whether or not those who are both anti-abortion and pro-death penalty are being intellectually inconsistent .  I didn’t get any conversation going on Twitter (I still have a very small following), but I got a lot of interaction on Facebook.  There was a big discussion, but the best answer came from a Catholic philosopher named Ron Belgau, who writes for a blog called Spiritual Friendship.  With his permission, I decided to share his response here.

Are pro-lifers who support the death penalty morally inconsistent? In order to answer this question, it’s important to consider alternate ways of understanding the right to life and the nature of personhood.

A. Regarding life:

1. One view would be that the life of a human person is always sacred, and that it is always wrong to intentionally kill a person.

2. Another view would be that it is always wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human person, but that in certain circumstances–war, or the punishment for very serious crimes, for example–a person forfeits their right to life, and may be killed in order to protect the right to life of other innocent human persons.

B. Regarding persons:

1. One view would be that every human being is a human person from the moment of conception; that is, that they are a person simply because they are a human being.

2. The other view would be that personhood requires something more–a certain kind of self-consciousness that is typical of normally functioning adult human beings. On this view, certain human beings are not human persons, or are only “marginal persons,” and so are not protected by either version of the principle about the sanctity of human life.

A person who holds both A1 and B1 would oppose abortion and the death penalty. Holding A1 and B2 would entail opposition to the death penalty but could permit abortion; and holding A2 and B1 would entail opposition to abortion but could permit the death penalty. Holding both A2 and B2 could permit both. In other words, B1 is the essential conviction for pro-lifers, while A1 is the essential conviction for those who oppose the death penalty. In order for it to be logically inconsistent for pro-lifers to support the death penalty, it would have to be logically inconsistent to accept B1 and also accept A2. Or, to put it another way, accepting B1 would have to logically entail accepting A1. I do not see why it would be logically inconsistent for someone who supports B1 to accept A2; but at the very least, if opponents of the death penalty want to argue that pro-lifers are logically inconsistent, they need to show why the belief that life begins at conception is logically inconsistent with the belief that societies can kill in extreme circumstances to protect themselves from those who are a serious threat to the lives of others

Side Note: When I say that A2 could permit capital punishment, and B2 could permit abortion, I do not mean that they must do so. Consider A2 and the death penalty. To say that people may be killed to protect society against war or murder is not to say that they must be killed. It only means that if there is no other way to defend life except to kill those who threaten it, then killing them is permitted. But if there are non-lethal methods of protecting society from war or murder, these are preferable. In a society with a relatively low level of social development, it may be a serious burden to keep criminals locked up, and may be difficult to establish jails secure enough to protect against escape. So I think such a society could be justified in executing murderers after a serious effort at verifying guilt. But in an advanced society like the United States, it may be possible to adequately protect society without putting murderers to death. In which case, A2 may not provide an adequate justification for the death penalty. Nevertheless, if an unborn child is a person (B1), then A2 provides a much stronger reason for opposing abortion than for opposing the death penalty, because the child is innocent and is not threatening anyone; therefore, killing it cannot be self-defense in the same way that killing can protect society from war and murder. (This principle might be used to authorize abortion in cases where continuing the pregnancy directly threatens the life of the mother.)

I hope Ron’s response helps everyone think through the logic or this issue.

Mackie’s Error Theory: Morality and Naturalism

This article was originally featured on ResistanceTV.

Brief Introduction

“There are no objective values.”  So starts the first chapter of J.L. Mackie’s book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, where he argues that there are no objective, universally prescriptive moral facts.

Moral facts are the things that make our moral judgments, like “It is wrong to rape people” or “We ought to treat everyone equally” true or false.  The view that moral facts exist is called moral realism or objectivism.  Mackie’s view is a cognitivist view, which means that our moral judgments express believes that have truth-value (they are either true or false), but it is not an example of moral realism.  Mackie argued that all of our moral judgments and beliefs are false.  This is why it is called “Error Theory.”  How does he argue for this position?

His argument combines a conceptual claim about our moral judgments and an ontological claim about the existence of moral facts.

1) Conceptual claim: Our moral concepts are concepts of universally prescriptive, categorical facts in the world.

2) Ontological claim: There are no such facts in the world.

Whether our beliefs are true or false depends on whether they correspond to reality.  If I believe “Earth has one moon,” that belief is true because Earth does, in fact, have one moon.  If I believe “My dog is the same as my cat,” then that belief is false because that belief does not correspond to reality.  My dog is not, in fact, my cat.  Since there is nothing in the world that corresponds to our beliefs about moral facts, our moral beliefs and claims are all false.  That is why Mackie’s view is called Error Theory, because we are literally in error.

Mackie’s Defense of His Claims

Mackie argues for (1) by showing that many philosophers in the Western tradition have defended objective moral values.  While acknowledging that many thinkers are moral subjectivists he says “the main tradition of European moral philosophy includes the contrary claim, that there are objective values of just the sort I have denied,” (p. 30).  He cites philosophers like Plato, Kant, Sidgwick, Aristotle, Samuel Clarke, Hutcheson, Richard Price, and says Hume noticed the prevalence of the objectivist tradition as well.  He also argues that the objectivist tradition has a firm basis in ordinary thought.  When many people ask if a certain action is wrong, they are not asking what they feel about the action or what benefit they think it will give them, they are asking if the action itself is wrong.  Mackie also claims that existentialism and its influence on people shows that people tend to objectify their concerns.  People who cease to believe that objective moral facts or values exist tend to begin believing that nothing matters at all; that life has no purpose.  This suggests that those people were objectifying their moral judgments so that they were something external to them, not just aspects of their own ideas, thoughts, and desires (p. 34).

Mackie argues for (2) in a few different ways, but the argument I will focus on here is the argument from queerness.

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.  Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty or moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. (p. 38)

In order to argue that moral facts do not exist, Mackie combines a metaphysical argument with an epistemological argument.  The metaphysical argument is that moral facts would be very “queer” properties unlike any other kinds of properties we know.  Moral facts are the kinds of things that have a demand for an action built into them.  They are prescriptive facts telling us how we ought to act.  The facts that we are all acquainted with, however, are prescriptively inert.  The facts or properties that we are all familiar with, physical properties, do not have demands for certain actions built into them.  They do not tell us how things ought to be, they just tell us how things are.  They are descriptive rather than prescriptive. These physical properties, which are descriptive properties that tell us how things are, are the kinds of properties that we are very well acquainted with and they are explicable on naturalism.  Moral properties, which are prescriptive properties that tell us how things ought to be, are strange and not easily explainable on naturalism, since the moral properties themselves would not be natural.

The epistemological argument is that we would need a special faculty that was able to detect these moral properties.  We have different faculties for detecting things in the world, and these faculties are how we gain knowledge about the world.  For example, our eyes pick up light and allow us to see, our noses detect scents in the air and allow us to smell, our ears detect the vibrations in the air and allow us to hear sound.  Through these different faculties we detect different things in the world and learn about them.  But what kind of faculty would we need to have in order to detect non-physical, universally prescriptive moral facts?  It is not clear what on earth this faculty could be or how we can gain knowledge of moral facts through it.  So, Mackie concludes from this that we have good reason to reject the actual existence of moral facts.

Conclusion

To sum up, Mackie claims that our moral concepts are concepts of universally prescriptive facts, but these facts do not exist in the world, so our moral concepts are literally false.  He argues against their existence by showing that such facts would be metaphysically “queer” on naturalism and it is not clear how we would even know their existence.

If Mackie is right, then a naturalist would have to deny moral facts because they are not the kinds of things that would be natural.  If one thinks that moral facts do exist, then one has reason to reject naturalism.

Resources

(1) Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Middelessex: Penguin, 1990. Print.

(2) Miller, Alexander. An Introduction to Contemporary Metaethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003. Print.

Be Sure to Clarify Ambiguous Words When Debating

This article was originally featured on ResistanceTV.

Ambiguity

Something that I have quickly learned in my philosophical studies and my job teaching English to Chinese kids is that individual words often have more than one meaning.  When you use a word in a sentence that has more than one meaning, but the meaning of that word is not clear in its context, the word is ambiguous.  This is one way that our words can be unclear. One of the things that affects the productivity of discussion and debate is that people will use the same words, but mean slightly different things by them.  Unless the debaters are clear on what they mean by the words that they use, ambiguity will remain and the debaters will be talking past each other.

An Example from Discussions on Morality

An example of where ambiguity can negatively affect a discussion is in the realm of morality.  The word “morality” is an ambiguous word and, unless the speakers are clear, it can be easy for speakers to talk past each other on this issue.  Most of the time, “morality” can mean one of three things:

1. Moral Beliefs: These are simply what one believes is right or wrong; good or bad.
2. Moral Behaviors: These are the right or wrong behaviors or actions that people engage in.
3. Moral Facts: These are the truth-makers for moral claims.  A moral fact is what makes our moral judgments true or false.

When Christians and atheists debate on how Christianity or atheism ground morality, I think both groups often talk past each other because they sometimes mean different things by “morality.”  Often, when an atheist uses the word “morality,” he is talking about moral beliefs and behaviors.  If an atheist says “We don’t need religion or belief in God to explain morality,” he likely means that we do not need God to explain the development of moral beliefs and behaviors.  Dawkins, for example, says this

We now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other.  First, there is the special case of genetic kinship.  Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in ‘anticipation’ of payback.  Following on from this there is, third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness.  And fourth, if Zahavi is right, there is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising. (The God Delusion, pg. 251)

Dawkins gives an account of how moral beliefs and behaviors may have developed, but that does not address whether moral facts exist. However, when a Christian says “morality,” she often means moral facts.  When a Christian says “In order for moral values to exist, God needs to exist,” she is likely talking about the things that make our moral judgments true or false.  Notice that they are not actually disagreeing with each other.  They can both agree with each other because neither of their claims are inconsistent with one another due to the fact that they are referring to different things when they say “morality.”  In fact, William Lane Craig constantly makes it clear that the moral argument for God’s existence is referencing moral facts, not beliefs and behaviors.

Now it’s important that we remain clear in understanding the issue before us.  The question is not: Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives?  There’s no reason to think that atheists and theists alike may not live what we normally characterize as good and decent lives.  Similarly, the question is not: Can we formulate a system of ethics without reference to God?  If the non-theist grants that human beings do have objective value, then there’s no reason to think that he cannot work out a system of ethics with which the theist would also largely agree.  Or again, the question is not: Can we recognize the existence of objective moral values without reference to God?  The theist will typically maintain that a person need not believe in God in order to recognize, say, that we should love our children. (Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. pg. 175-176)

When this ambiguity is not cleared up and eliminated, the atheist and the Christian are simply talking past each other and no progress is being made in the discussion.

Be Clear on the Meaning of your Words

The example I gave above is just one subject where ambiguity can come up.  There are many other controversial topics where ambiguous words can pop up, so my advice is to make sure that you clearly know what you mean when you use certain words and that you clearly express the meaning of that word to whoever you are speaking to.  You should also make sure that the individual or individuals that you are debating are clear with their words too.  Ask questions like “What do you mean by x?” or “When you say x, do you mean?. . .”  Being clear will help your apologetic and hopefully make your discussions more productive.

Note: A good book to read on how to discuss your Christian beliefs in a winsome and intelligent way is Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Greg Koukl.