Words and their Meaning

LESSON 2 OF 23 James M. Grier, Th.D. Distinguished Professor of Philosophical Theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan WE503 Christian Ethics: A Biblical Theology of Morality The following lecture has been produced for the Christian University GlobalNet and is copyrighted by Christian University GlobalNet, Grand Rapids, Michigan. All audio rights are reserved worldwide. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of Christian University GlobalNet. The lecturer holds exclusive publication rights to all of the intellectual material in the lecture. James M. Grier, Th.D.: Notes: This is lesson two in our series, and again it will deal with some introductory materials. May I remind you that last time we talked about the science of ethics, and said that it deals with three basic things; it deals with obligation, with values, and with motivation. We also talked about the moral dilemma of the 20thcentury and spent a good deal of time reflecting upon some of the contributory causes that brought it about. Today, we want to go on with some more introductory kinds of things and get some distinctions in our mind about words and their meaning. The first contrast that I d like to deal with is the difference between acting according to and acting from a law. Normally we use the law as a very broad concept; we talk about the laws of science, we talk about moral laws, we talk about sociological laws, civil laws, all kinds of laws. Yet there is a difference between those kinds of laws. There are scientific laws that exist, that you have no choice about. For instance, if you have eaten recently, there are certain laws of digestion that are operating in your body right now. You cannot choose to have them describe what s going on or not to describe going on. Those are laws you act according to. If you step out of a second story window you re not free to choose not to have the law of gravity govern your conduct. Frankly, you re going to splatter on the ground two stories down. For you see that s not a law that you act from, it s a law you act according to. When we use the word moral law, we re talking about the kinds of laws that we act from. Acting from a law means that you can choose to have the law describe your behavior or you can choose not to have the law describe your behavior. Moral laws are different than scientific laws in that sense. In a moral law it doesn t determine what happens, it becomes something that you can 1 of 10

choose to use to guide your conduct or you can choose not to have it guide your conduct and thus somehow violate that law. That s an important distinction. We ll talk about it a little later on when we think about the philosophy and the ethics of Immanuel Kant. In light of that distinction, there has been a technical word developed in ethics to talk about moral laws, it s the word maxim. A maxim is by definition, a rule of action or conduct which a person chooses or can choose to have describe his behavior. So a maxim really is a good definition of a moral law. A moral law is a maxim that you could choose to have describe your behavior or choose not. Now, these moral maxims cover morality but we have sociological maxims and we have civil maxims. For instance, if I said to you, help that lady cross the street, that s probably a sociological maxim. You could choose to have that govern your behavior or not to govern your behavior. The point would be that if you chose not to have it govern your behavior you would pay a social penalty for failing to help the old lady. You wouldn t pay a moral penalty because you didn t violate a moral law. Civil law is like that as well in many instances. If the speed limit says 55 and you re driving 65, you have violated a civil maxim. And when that red light flashes behind you and the trooper with his hat comes up to your window and asks for your license and registration you re going to end up getting a summons s written and you re going to pay a civil penalty a fine. One way to determine the distinction between sociological, civil and moral maxims is by the kind of penalty you pay. If you pay a moral penalty then you have violated a moral maxim. If you pay a civil penalty, you have violated a civil maxim. If you pay a social penalty you will have violated a social maxim. Those maxims are very much a part of everyday life and they describe the distinction between acting from and acting according to. Another distinction that s important to think about is a distinction in approaches to our understanding of what constitutes an ethical norm. One of the nice things about philosophical ethics is this almost all ethical theories can be organized under one of two headings. Strange to say, but no matter how different they are in detail, almost all of them fit a kind of simple two category structure. The first category is the category of Deontology. Now for many of you this will be a new word. It comes from the Greek particle day which means it is necessary or it denotes compulsion that it is something that should be done. Deontology is an approach to ethical theory that says the rightness or wrongness of an act is intrinsic to the act and extrinsic to the consequences of the act. Let s flesh out the meaning of that statement. An act is right not because it leads to good consequences; an act is right because it s right in itself, 2 of 10

that s what deontology would say. An act is wrong not because it leads to bad consequences, but the act is wrong in and of itself. Now as a generalization that will help you to learn one of the important words in theory of obligation that constitutes one of the major categories that exists in ethics. The second major category is called Consequential or Teleological ethics. In this kind of theory of obligation, it is simply said that the consequences of the action determine the rightness or wrongness of the action. That the act itself is never right or wrong. What makes an act right or wrong, are the consequences that come from the act. Probably the best known consequentialist in your life is Joseph Fletcher and his situational ethic. You recall that for Fletcher, a moral act that is right is an act in which the consequences maximize love and minimize hate. Therefore your moral duty in every choice is to maximize through the consequences of your action the most amount of love possible for the greatest number of people. Consequentialism basically says only the consequences of an action enter into the evaluation of the rightness or the wrongness of an action or a rule. Now friends, although that s a very rough-ready two category structure. It is my considered judgment that all philosophical ethical theories I know including biblical ethics can be categorized under the heading of either being a Deontological theory of obligation or a Consequential theory of obligation. So the sooner you learn to handle these two words, the more ease you will have in the textbook reading, as well as in listening to the other lecture tapes. The next category I wish to talk to you about is to describe for you normative ethics. Normative ethics assumes that one s conduct can be judged by a standard. It will be different than emotive ethics, which simply wonders about one s emotional responses. Normative ethics says there is the possibility of making actual judgments about the rightness or wrongness of an act or the appropriateness of values. Therefore, when we talk about a normative ethic, we are saying that one holds a theory of obligation either Deontological or Consequential and this theory will enable them to assess the rightness or wrongness, the obligatoriness or forbiddenness of any action they ever commit. Now of course the problem with the judgment of obligation is that the words we use to evaluate it are words that have many connotations. For instance, we might say this judgment of obligation is right, that sounds okay. But then I might say to you that is the right answer. And I certainly have use the word differently, or I might say to you turn right at the next corner. You see our language here has great ambiguity to it and that ambiguity causes us not to feel precise, when we make these judgments of obligation, when we use words like right and wrong and things of that character. And that s going to be a pitfall that we will face all the way through the course. Certain words that we 3 of 10

use everyday of our lives, when it comes to the ethical constructs have a much different connotation than what they have out of the sphere of ethics. The second normative aspect of ethics is the judgment of values. Values have to do with the assessment of persons, groups of persons, states of affairs, motives and events. And the words we use when we make judgments of value are words like good or bad or better or worse. We could go to a concert and say that was good music or we could reach down and pat our dog and say, good dog. And then strangely enough in the next breath we can say God is good. Here we are aback at the ambiguity of the pitfalls of language again. We use this word good in such a broad range of meaning and the semantic range of bad is just as difficult to deal with. But in the normative theory of judgment when we come to the value aspect of it those are the typical words we use. We could say he is a bad person. We are making a value judgment about that person when we do that. When we say he s a good dog we re probably not making the same kind of value judgment. There probably what we mean is something like this, as far as dogs are concerned, this is above average specimen of what is a dog is supposed to do. As what we say when we say a good knife or things like that. The important feature here is to understand that when you make a judgment of value, you re going to assess persons, groups of persons, motives, states of affairs and events. The evaluative words are going to have meaning far outside the domain of value theory. Therefore, one has to be very careful when one makes these judgments, that words are used in an ethical sense precisely. Let me go on and describe for you, how a normative theory of obligation can be found in anyone s thinking pattern. Very often, this normative theory of obligation can be found in a statement like this. All actions or rules which have properties A, B and C are right. That means any action or any rule with these properties will be a right act. It doesn t matter what you denote these properties to be this is just how the theory is expressed. Supposed I said to you, any action that is commanded by God that is done for the glory of God and is done for the advancement of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is a right act. There I would be giving you my normative theory of obligation. Every ethical system will state its normative theory of obligation in something of that character. Let me illustrate it to you. Some young man in a dorm says to his friend on a secular campus, Don t seduce Sally. And his friend says, Why? And the response is, Well she s a virgin and you ought not to seduce the sexually uninitiated. And the friend answers, Why? And again, the response comes, You will weaken her moral fiber, you will lead her to promiscuity, and you will cause her pain. And again the answer comes, So what? Well, the final reply is, One had not ought to cause anyone pain. The reason being, pain is evil and an act that causes evil is a wrong act. Now friends, it is clear to me 4 of 10

that this theory of obligation is a consequential theory of obligation. It says any act which has the property of causing pain to other people is a wrong act. Now pain is a consequence of the act and therefore it is a consequential theory of obligation. It would seem to me the next thing we need to talk about at least in general term is, How do we justify our moral judgments? If I say to you, this would be the right action in this circumstance and you challenged me, what kind of justification could I give you for it? In order to answer that question in an introductory way, let me ask it in Epistemological terms. If the word Epistemology is new to you, let me suggest that it simply means theory of knowledge. It answers four basic questions. What is the origin of knowledge? What is the nature of knowledge? How is knowledge tested? And what are the limits of knowledge? Suppose, I say to you that this check I have in my hand is a forgery. I am asserting a truth claim and you might challenge that and say to me How do you know that s a forgery? and I would answer something like this. I saw someone sign that check and the person who signed it the name he signed isn t his own name. Now, that s pretty strong evidence that that check is a forgery. It simply says that the evidence I have for my truth assertion is deductively related to the truth assertion. Now when it comes to justifying an ethical judgment, would we do it the same way? Would we be able to produce pieces of information that would justify the judgment? And in justifying the judgment find that the evidence for the judgment deductively relates to demonstrating the truth of the judgment? Well I would suggest to you that s probably the right model; that the relationship between the evidence for a moral judgment and the moral judgment is a deductive relationship. The end product of that deductive relationship allows you to show the evidence that stands behind either your judgment of obligation or your judgment of value. Well, if that s the case, then it does seem to me that in doing ethics, one must have some capacity to do some very basic logic. That is, we must be able to test the validity of the relationship between the evidence for our moral judgments, and the moral judgments themselves. Now, I would kind of like to expose you to some basic logic principles, but I don t think that would work too well within the framework of this class. I m going to assume, that you know how to test inference for validity and suggest to you that in the rest of the lectures we re going to spend a great deal of time using a hypothetical syllogism as the vehicle for under-girding our moral judgments. The hypothetical syllogism has a hypothetical proposition at its heart. Let me illustrate it to you, if I ought to maximize good in the world then I should write to my parents. That s a hypothetical proposition. It simply 5 of 10

says that maximizing good is a sufficient condition to cause me to write to my parents. Now the minor premise says I ought to maximize good in the world, then it logically follows I ought to write to my parents. All I m trying to do is show you how logic works to under-gird the relationship between the reasons for our moral judgments, and the moral judgment. I would suggest to you that if you don t have any background in doing some basic logic, then it would be very helpful for you to purchase a self-help book and to work your way through linguistic logic and in particular the hypothetical syllogism, so that you will be able to use inference to justify moral judgments. It would seem to me that would be true not only in personal moral judgments, but even when we are going to use biblical data to justify our moral judgments. Ultimately that biblical data is going to have to have valid inference in relationship to the moral judgment. I think that covers most of the introductory matters that I think are important for us to think about. We have talked about some words that we need to learn; deontology, consequentialism. We ve talked about the distinction between acting from and acting according to and learned the word maxim as a moral rule that we can choose to have describe our behavior or not. We ve learned how ethical theories of obligation are stated and justified, and ethical judgments of value are stated and justified and the role of logic in those domains. I would like then to turn to a second aspect of the course and that is to give you a brief understanding of the history of ethics in Western culture. Now in your textbook reading, you are going to be reading books that are going to give you this by explaining ethical systems to you. I do not wish to follow the same method that the textbooks use and therefore I kind of like to give you a historical overview of ethical systems in a very brief fashion. Philosophy began in Western culture in the 6th century BC in the Greek Ionian culture. And it began in certain sets of cosmologies. Most of them were naturalistic in their orientation. That is, they explained reality in terms of fire or earth or water or air, and therefore they were kind of reductionistic. For most of us naturalism is a very significant part of our lives. Naturalism as an ethical system and as a philosophical system has experienced great growth in the 20th century. Let me give you the three basic assumptions that stand behind all forms of naturalistic ethics: 1. Nature is the ultimate reality; not only is it ultimate but it is the only reality. 2. Man belongs to nature, is a part of it and no part of man transcends nature. 3. Given that nature is in process and therefore it is non-static then truth and morality are intrinsically time bound and non-static. 6 of 10

Now, these are the logical conclusions of any system of Philosophy who concludes that the totality of reality is objects and events in time and space. If that s all there is to the world and if you re committed to an empirical epistemology that says all knowledge begins with sense perception then obviously using that epistemology, you re never going to get to the God of Bible because you can never have the sense perception of an immortal invisible spirit. Not only will you not get to the God of the Bible from this assumptive base but you can never get to biblical ethics from this assumptive base. Because a moral command is not something that you can have a sensation of, a value is not an object or an event in time and space, and therefore values can t be known and moral commands can t be known, all they can be is somehow, relativistic statements of personal preference. And naturalism has dominated Western culture philosophically in the last two centuries. And it seems as normal as apple pie to us, that is we are so used to being around it especially in its scientific mode that we never ever question whether or not this assumption is correct. We need to be sure that we don t conclude that naturalists don t have religion. There are many naturalists, who do have religious commitments. In point of fact, in most cities, you could attend church, at a church that has basically been founded on naturalistic assumptions. Do you know what church that would be? Yes, sure right it would be the Unitarian Church. Historically, religion and naturalism has lived together. And they have bound themselves in certain ways, and they worship in certain ways. One of the dangers we face today is to use the word naturalism as if it is a synonym for humanism. Many naturalists are humanists, but you can be a humanist and be an existentialist or be a pragmatist and therefore humanism isn t one single philosophical system. Humanism has been expressed through a number of philosophical systems. I think we need to be careful that we don t imply in our culture that humanism is one monolithic philosophical system that we all stand against and hate and that it s naturalistic and it s atheistic in its assumptions. Certainly that s true of naturalistic humanism, but it may not be true of existentialistic and/or pragmatic or instrumentalist forms of humanism. Well, if naturalism has ruled in Western culture in the 19th and 20th century. What is it that has been the majority position through the rest of the time in Western culture? Ladies and gentlemen, the notion that s at the heart of this is the concept of idealistic ethics. Now, idealism as a philosophical system, almost passed out of existence in Europe, post World War I and certainly has almost passed out of existence in America, post World War II and yet idealism in philosophy is the majority position in the history of philosophy. Most people aren t aware of that and most people are not aware of the fact that you can have moral absolutes on an idealistic foundation. 7 of 10

Let me share with you the three major assumptions of most idealistic ethics. The first assumption is metaphysical. Nature and man are material and real but they are not the ultimate reality. The ultimate reality is immaterial, rational and moral. That is, there are two reals. We usually call this metaphysical dualism. One real the world, man, animals, trees, they are real but they are not the ultimate real. The ultimate real is the transcended domain. It is comprised of things that are immaterial like the soul of man, like morality, like God. The second assumption is that knowledge of morality will automatically bring the practice of morality. Performance follows automatically from knowing the truth. I think this assumption of idealism has penetrated us in the church. We have this notion that about all we ever have to do when we preach is somehow stand up there and tell people the truth and its meaning and once they hear and know the truth they will automatically do it. My has that ever been a farce and a failure in the Church of Jesus Christ! In point of fact almost every congregation knows so much more than they ever put into action. It would be true to say of those of us who teach in theological disciplines, that we know far more than we ever put into action, and it just doesn t work out in the crucible of life that the practice of the good automatically follows the knowledge of the good. The third assumption behind this system is that truth and morality are both inside of man as well as outside of man. That is internal to man. There is a moral consciousness. There is a moral nature so that morality is internal, and therefore subjective. But morality is also external. It belongs to the unchanging, immaterial, universal, eternal domain, to the domain of God and freedom, to the domain of universals, to the domain of that which is fixed and sure. So that their final assumption is that man has moral point of contact internal to himself and yet there is an objective moral reality that exists in the transcendent domain outside of man. Now of course class, the father of all of this kind of thinking was Plato. For Plato, there was a logical priority of the eternal invisible over the time/space world. What makes man like God is that man bears reason and morality, and he has an immortal part. What makes man like animals is that man has a body that is subject to all the causal laws of science but they aren t what is important in man. What s important in man is his immaterial, rational soul. Strange to say, that we in Christian theology have very often almost adopted a Platonic idealism as the vehicle for the expression of Christianity. In point of fact, it would be fair to say to you that Augustine through the Neo-platonic writer Plotinus took Platonic thought and made it the philosophical vehicle for the expression of Christian theology in the 4th century. Therefore the Platonic idealistic things have often been identified with Christianity. 8 of 10

After Plato, this was developed by Aristotle, coming up into the post- Renaissance world, it develops strongly in Europe with the thought of Rene Descarte, the thought of Georg Hegel, of Hacking(cannot verify spelling), of Schelling, of Kant, of Fichte many, many western German philosophers developed this during that post-renaissance world. One of them and an important one is Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant struggled between the conflict, between naturalism and idealism. In point of fact, Kant said that Hume was right that if indeed knowledge only begins with perception and everything is in flux then there is no foundation for true science, and there is no foundation for religion. And Kant was fully aware that if you went the straight idealistic route that you would end up with a philosophy that had no contact with empirical experience of the world. So Immanuel Kant came up with an amazing synthesis than in my judgment is a watershed of Western philosophy. Kant concluded that man does live in two realms of reality; he called them the phenomenal realm and the nominal realm. In the phenomenal realm man has knowledge. Knowledge begins with sense perception, not just sense perception that leads to total flux but sense perception which is ordered by the mind through a certain set of categories so that man can produce reliable fixed truth. In the phenomenal domain, knowledge is a composite of two things. It originates in the external world by sense perception he called those the percepts and then the mind contributes something he called those the concepts. So that the percepts come to the mind and the mind has a prestructure to it and it organizes and categorizes the percepts in a particular way, and it is what is in the mind that is absolute and universal and when you bring those changing percepts to it and you put those two together you get a form of knowledge that gives a sure foundation for science doesn t end up in skepticism. Immanuel Kant was a genius. He understood that if you concluded that all of reality and all of knowledge begins with sense perception, you have precluded the possibility of morality, of religion, and of God. So for Kant he had a second domain, the nominal domain. In this domain you don t start with sense perception. In this domain, you do not have the absolute pre-structured categories of the human mind. In this domain, all you have is speculative reason. This is the area of religion of freedom, of morality. This is the area, where man is able to come to religious commitments and to have faith in God. Quite frankly, Immanuel Kant was the man who made the distinction between faith and facts. Facts have to do with science, sense perception, categories and sure knowledge. Faith doesn t deal with facts. Faith deals with the transcendent domain that doesn t begin with sense perception. Immanuel Kant is known as the great Protestant philosopher, who puts science on ultimate foundation and still left room for God. Sad to say but true, the influence of Immanuel 9 of 10

Kant is alive and well in Christian theology today. For most people faith and facts don t go together, but faith is somehow holding on to that which cannot be known to be true. In the midst of that, with that kind of dichotomy we have ended up in Christianity, with a very diverse worldview. Well, let me take a moment and explain to you, what Kant s moral theory was like as we bring this lesson to completion. For Immanuel Kant, morality belonged to the transcendent domain, it belonged to the nominal. It didn t begin with sense perception. In point of fact it belonged to the freedom of man s will and it belonged to man in terms of his duty. He argued like this, everybody experiences a feeling of ought. You excuse this because I m going to invent a word. Ought implies an oughtor, someone who makes you feel the obligation. No oughtor - no oughtness. Everyone recognizes that God is the source of the feeling of obligation or duty. Therefore God intends that people who do their duty will be happy and blessed and people who don t do their duty will experience misery. And therefore, Immanuel Kant had an eschatology He believed in Heaven, and he believed in judgment. People who did their duty, and they were unhappy in this life are people who in the life to come would have eternal felicitous, because God would give them happiness because they did the right thing. And people in this world who don t do their duty often in this life experience happiness. But in the life to come they are going to experience the ultimate unhappiness that is alienation from God. For Kant, that future he called the Kingdom of God, where justice would prevail, where those who did their moral duty would be able to live in felicitude and happiness. And those who did not would experience retributive justice and all the things that belong to not doing your duty. This course is a part of the curriculum offered through Christian University GlobalNet (CUGN). To learn more, visit us at www.cugn.org. Those two positions, naturalism and idealism are just about thesis and antithesis when you come to think about the history of Western philosophy and the history of Western ethics. Frankly, from very early in the 3rd century all the way up to approximately the 18th century idealism reigns supreme. In the 19th and 20th centuries naturalism has taken over. One is relativistic, when it comes to ethics, the other has some absolutes. Neither one of them fit a biblical model. Today idealism isn t known to our people because you see contrary to everything you think it is possible to have absolute ethics without assuming the God of the Bible or His self revelation in scripture. Well, that will help us to understand at least two pole positions and bring us to a clear understanding of how in Western philosophy certain ethical motifs have developed and dominated us. All material in the preceding lecture is protected by registered international copyright and may not be reproduced in any form whatsoever without the written permission of Christian University Globalnet. 10 of 10