Going Against the Norm

Normblog asks:

Since God seems to be conceivable as a foundation for morality without further ado, why can’t certain moral principles (respect for life, justice, the right to liberty) be conceived as normatively fundamental without further ado?

Let me start with the simplest of the observations I have to make about this: Normblog itself has God-like powers in that something can be made normative merely by virtue of Mr. Geras’ propounding it. That leaves things a little unfair. But one must soldier on regardless.

A couple more observations, then. First, I wouldn’t say that God is conceivable as a foundation for morality – I would say that God’s being a foundation of morality is part of the very definition of who or what God is. It’s the very raison d’être of God, or at least a key part of it. According to the Abramic tradition, God is eternal, God is omnipotent, God is good (there’s the morality, built right in) – and it’s God’s commandments that all people must obey. The distinction is in the timing: it’s not that the idea, notion or concept of God was already there, and then at some point someone conceived it also as a foundation for morality: its being a foundation for morality was part of its very beginning.

Here’s a less subtle point: this conceiving of God as a foundation for morality did not happen ‘without further ado’. If Freud’s ideas about how God (meaning here of course the concept of God) came into being are correct, well, that was a process of thousands of years at least, perhaps more. If, on the other hand, God never came into being at all because He’s always existed, well then, in that case He really exists and ‘conceiving of Him as a basis for morality without further ado’ hardly captures the process by which He revealed Himself and his moral will and law to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and apparently also Jesus and Mohammed and lots of others on the way along in there.

But most importantly, the concept, idea, notion, or, if such be the case, reality of God is a very different thing from a moral principle. God, if He exists as commonly understood, is an agent (and, according to ancient reports, an extremely powerful one). God, according to the tradition that has Him as a basis for morality in the first place, has created the world and He has created us, and He has done so that we might obey and please Him, and should we fail to do so He may punish us. God wills, God commands, God even threatens. In the God scenario, it’s not that we took the concept of God and conceived it as a foundation for morality; that was never our choice to make. We can take or leave principles – we can make them a basis for morality, or sneeze at them. But we don’t decide or choose whether or not God exists, and if He does then it’s He who decides the basis for morality and not we.

The idea of God as a basis for morality is the idea that an eternal and omnipotent agent has willed and commanded us to live a certain way. I’m not sure there’s anything obvious that this has in common with the idea of principles as a basis for morality, in which we choose certain abstract principles that we decide we’re going to live by.

I surmise that Norm came at his post from the point of view of an atheist writing for atheists, assuming a shared understanding that obviously this God business is just another human construct. It might well be that, too. But if you take God as the basis for your morality then you don’t share that understanding — you actually believe He exists. Which makes your basis for morality a rather different kind of thing than a principle or a collection of principles. And if you don’t believe that God exists, then you’re not going to be arguing that He might be a basis for morality.

Aesthetics Got There Before Cognitive Science

There is an interesting post up at a blog called The Frontal Cortex on how the brain, while listening to music, makes predictions about what’s coming next, and is pleasurably stimulated when those preductions are confounded. The blog’s author, Jonah Lehrer, writes:

There are two interesting takeaways from this experiment. The first is that music hijacks some very fundamental neural mechanisms. The brain is designed to learn by association: if this, then that. Music works by subtly toying with our expected associations, enticing us to make predictions about what note will come next, and then confronting us with our prediction errors. In other words, every melody manipulates the same essential mechanisms we use to make sense of reality.

The second takeaway is that music requires surprise, the dissonance of “low-probability notes”. While most people think about music in terms of aesthetic beauty – we like pretty consonant pitches arranged in pretty patterns – that’s exactly backwards. The point of the prettiness is to set up the surprise, to frame the deviance. (That’s why the unexpected pitches triggered the most brain activity, synchronizing the activity of brain regions involved in motor movement and emotion.) I wrote about this concept in Proust Was A Neuroscientist.

Lehrer then goes on, quoting from something else he’d written earlier, to cite the philosopher and musicologist Leonard B. Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music which Meyer published in 1956. I haven’t read that book (yet) but many years ago I read and never forgot an article Meyer had published in 1959, Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music. It’s far shorter than a book but gets across Meyer’s account of what makes great music great very effectively. Unfortunately it appears to still be under copyright so I can’t just post here the copy I have scanned from an old (1980) edition of Aesthetics Today, but I believe that under fair use rules I can send it to you if you e-mail me and request a copy. If you want to know why, for example, Mahler was great while another conductor-composer, Leonard Bernstein, was merely very talented, this’ll explain it.

So Meyer got this worked out half a century before the neuroscientists at Goldsmiths and UCL. I love and respect science, but this seems to suggest that sometimes you can figure something out just by thinking about it.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

What Can We Do to Support Shalom Lappin?

I’m back, valued readers; sorry for the pause. Was travelling.

Just a very brief post still this evening, to link to a very important one here regarding an academic at King’s College who has been treated very shabbily. In a nutshell, Shalom Lappin was offered a chair with tenure at Hebrew University. After conferring with his institutional superiors at King’s and receiving assurance that his position there was secure, and preferring to remain in London, he turned down the offer from Jerusalem. Little more than half a year later, he was informed that his academic position was being eliminated and he himself being made redundant. He writes:

I now find myself threatened with redundancy six years before scheduled retirement, with totally inadequate pension provisions, while at the height of my research career. This is grossly unfair, and violates statements often made by the Principal and other members of the administration to the effect that excellence in research is King’s priority. This threat is also a serious miscarriage of justice, given my level of productivity, and the fact that I was allowed to give up a very attractive offer on the basis of assurances that have turned out to be without foundation.

Normblog announces that a campaign is under way within the philosophy profession and among King’s students to obtain redress for Shalom Lappin and others. I hope that that campaign can be broadened (or a parallel one launched) to include others who may wish to support, in particular, Shalom, whose writing at Normblog and Engage will be known to many who may not be familiar with his scholarly output.

Not Good Enough, But Still Good

The American Law Institute has now said, not that capital punishment should not be administered because it’s wrong, but that capital punishment should not be administered because, in practice, it cannot be done properly. It would have been better for them to declare that the death penalty is categorically wrong, but that was never going to happen. So we’ll have to be glad for this bit of progress in the fight against this particular, and particularly horrible, barbarism.

I Should Be So Lucky

Norm asks what he should do with all the pens that he gets from charities (no, these are not charities that provide pens to people who don’t have them). There’s a plague of pens going on in his house.

I envy him. I wish he could send his pens to me. In my house there are almost no pens at all, and the few there are are always hard to find. When something needs to be written down by hand, it’s always an onerous search to find a suitable writing instrument (not to mention a suitable piece of paper).

Not that we’re illiterate here. We’ve a library full of books and the dining room table usually has at least two laptops open on it (when it’s not being used for dining).

But the pens, I don’t know where they go. Sometimes I’ll buy one of those ten-packs they sell at the supermarket, figuring that introducing ten pens into the house all at once should make it easier to find one when one is needed. But no matter how often I do that, the situation does not improve. Where do they go?

Maybe I should give money to more charities. But that approach would presuppose that charity pens stick around more than supermarket ones do.

Proving a Thing Isn’t There

Today Norm has a post whose thrust and conclusion I completely agree with, but in which he says something that surprises me. It is this:

But there’s no defensible intellectual basis for the claim that institutional collectivities can’t coherently apologise for past wrongs when those issuing the apology bear no blame for the wrongs in question.

The claim mentioned here is one I disagree with just as Norm does. Moreover, it is likely that Norm has successfully refuted every intellectual basis for that claim with which he’s been presented. But how can he know that a defensible basis for the claim doesn’t exist? You can show me a thousand black crows, and you still won’t have proved that there is no such thing as a white crow.