Can Reason Never Rule When it Comes to Morality?

The River Raisin in our backyard

Last year I read Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. Many thought it to be 2011's book of the year. For Kahneman "fast thinking" is something we do all the time. It can't be turned off. Fast thinking generates first impressions, intuitions, intentions and feelings. Kahneman calls this "System 1." "Slow thinking," on the other hand, is something that can be turned on and off. This is reflective thinking, deliberate reasoning. Kahneman calls this "System 2." System 2 can check system 1 for errors.  However, activating system 2 requires a substantial amount of mental effort. For Kahneman "reason" (System 2) can and does rule, but not for the most part and with considerable effort.

Jonathan Haidt, in his The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, also claims that persons are mostly about System 1 and rarely about System 2. His language is different, but the outcome is in the same ballpark as Kahneman. Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting writes:

Haidt's view is that  "“we should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play.” Nevertheless, he adds, “if you put individuals together in the right way … you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent product of the social system.” Haidt’s view here is plausible, especially since, if reason could never rule, we couldn’t trust even Haidt’s own impressive line of rational argument from scientific evidence." (Gutting, "Haidt's Problem with Plato")

Haidt rightly sees, says Gutting, that snap-judgment decisions rule most of every person's moral decision-making. Ethics is more based on intuition rather than moral reasoning. Here Gutting critiques Haidt's analysis of Plato.

Gutting: "Plato’s intuitions are not like the snap judgments of everyday life, driven by genes and social conditioning. But nor are they the insights of individuals meditating in isolation. Plato’s intuitions derive from a long and complex process of physical, emotional and intellectual formation in a supportive social system. (This is what Plato means by the “education” of his philosopher-rulers.) These intuitions are what — given sufficient experience, maturity and, especially, responsible intellectual engagement with others — we hope will replace the snap-judgment intuitions Haidt rightly sees as underlying so much of our moral life."

Haidt's and Kahneman's work is important in understanding how "decision-making" actually works. For them it's mostly non-rational and non-logical in the sense of not forming premises that infer conclusions. Yet rationality (reflexive moral consciousness) is needed to argue for the truth of moral propositions.

McGrath on Inference to the Best Explanation

Our backyard

For any Christian theist who is interested in the relationship (if any) between science and religion Alister McGrath's Science and Religion: A New Introduction is essential reading.

McGrath, who has a Ph.D in biochemistry and another Ph.D in theology, is big on "inference to the best explanation." (See also McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology.) In my MCCC logic text Lewis Vaughn has an entire chapter (uniquely so) dedicated to inference to the best explanation (IBE).

Here's McGrath on the increasing relevance of IBE as related to the fading approach to scientific verificationism as exemplied by, e.g., Richard Dawkins. McGrath writes:

"Recent years have seen a growing interest within the philosophy of science in the idea of“inference to the best explanation. ” This represents a decisive move away from older positivist understandings of the scientific method, still occasionally encountered in popular accounts of the relation of science and religion, which holds that science is able to – and therefore ought to  – offer evidentially and inferentially infallible evidence for its theories. This approach, found at many points in the writings of Richard Dawkins, is now realized to be deeply problematic. It is particularly important to note that scientific data are capable of being interpreted in many ways, each of which has evidential support. In contrast, positivism tended to argue that there was a single unambiguous interpretation of the evidence, which any right -minded observer would discover." (Science and Religion, 52)

Nice. And helpful.

Overcoming Addiction to Prescription Drugs

My back yard by-the-river table

I don't see, from my very limited POV, a lot of Jesus-followers writing about overcoming addiction. Timothy Dalrymple does it here, in an article entitled "Overcoming Sex Addiction" (which is really about overcoming addiction to prescription pain-killing drugs).

For all who love God and yet suffer from chronic pain...

Philosophy of Religion - Room Change

Philosophy of Religion students:

Today's exam has been changed from room A-153 to room A-150.

How Children of Gay Parents Fare

(I feel the ghost of political correctness walking down the road looking for my house...)

In the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus published How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.

Immediately he was ad hominem-abused by the spirit of political correctness. The July 30 cover of The Weekly Standard showed Regnerus being medievally tortured by angry sociologists. (See "Revenge of the Sociologists.") Here's the cover:

In a recent interview Regnerus sums up the study's conclusions. He says:

"While social science cannot "prove" things, it can describe social reality. What the NFSS [New Family Structures Study] does describe is that the young-adult children of men and women who have had same-sex relationships appear more likely to have experienced problems, and in some cases continue to struggle, than those whose biological parents were and are still married. Why exactly this is the case is an important question that should continue to be explored and debated." (Emphasis mine)

Question: What problems in particular do young-adult children of parents who have had same-sex relationships encounter? Emotional, financial, spiritual?

Regnerus: "They report a variety of challenges, especially if they witnessed elevated instability in their household. Most of them have seen some [non-parent adults] coming and going. Among other things, they are more apt to report financial and employment difficulties, to finish less schooling, feel more ambivalence about their family experiences while growing up, smoke more, have more run-ins with the law, and report more sexual partners and greater victimization than those children from biologically intact, stable marriages. I didn't include religion or spirituality in the published study."

MCCC Logic Students - Exam #2

For my MCCC Logic students:

Exam #2 (Vaughn, The Power of Critical Thinking: Effective Reasoning About Ordinary and Extraordinary Claims, Chapter 2)...

...is tonight! 

What Divorce Really Does to Children

Judith Wallerstein

Does anyone really think that a child who experiences his mother and father divorcing will be unaffected and "get through it?" Only someone ignorant and, I think, self-interested (adultocentric) would think so.

This is the message no one wants to hear. U-C Berkeley psychologist Judith Wallerstein delivered it in her landmark, never-before-done 25-year longitudinal study of what happens to children of divorce - The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study. I read it years ago, and occasionally lent it to oblivious parents who parroted the words "My kids will be OK."

I saw today that Wallerstein died this summer. The nytimes obituary on her passing said:

"In 1971, Ms. Wallerstein began studying 131 children from 60 divorced families in Marin County, Calif. She followed them for 25 years, conducting intensive interviews every five years.

 

Not unexpectedly, many of the children were extremely distressed soon after the divorce. But she was surprised to find that the problems often lasted; 10 and 15 years later, half the children were still suffering and, she wrote, had become “worried, underachieving, self-deprecating and sometimes angry young men and women.”

 

They had a tougher time than most people in forming intimate relationships. Only about 40 percent eventually married, half the rate among the general population. Those who did marry were more likely to divorce than were people who had grown up in families that remained intact.

 

In 1976, Ms. Wallerstein told The New York Times, “I don’t want to say don’t divorce, but I think the children might even prefer having an unhappy family” to one riven by a split.

 

It was a message many people did not want to hear."

Husbands - Love Your Wives

Linda, in Starbuck's Ann Arbor

Today I wrote a note to a friend - call him Q; call his wife A.

"Dear Q:

How are you doing in loving A as Christ loves the church and gave his life for her? As you know, for me, there is nothing more important in my life than loving Linda and learing to love her this way, as her husband. Of course this comes after loving God. But in loving God, God tells me to love Linda, as a first priority.

We pray for your marriage, and love you both so much!"

 

I've got marriages on my mind! Linda and I always have marriages on our minds.

 

I began reading another book on marriage yesterday - Judith Wallerstein's The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts. Years ago I read Wallerstein's ground-breaking, longitudinal study on children of divorce. If there's anyone who's contemplating divorce and thinks "the kids will be OK," they are a fool. For the evidence read: The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study.  

 

Out of this study came Wallerstein's book on marriage. She found many women saying these words to her: "Happy marriages don't exist." So Wallerstein the social psychologist (formerly teaching at U-C Berkeley; Hebrew U. in Jerusalem) went out to see if she could find any. Her marriage book is about this, and the qualities that make for loving, enduring, lifelong marriages.

 

That's what Linda and I are into. Thank God we've seen and been influenced by some healthy marriages! We pray the same (and even better) for the marital partners in our Redeemer family.

The Strongest Philosophical Argument Against God's Existence

Woodland Cemetery, Monroe

In my MCCC Philosophy of Religion course we have completed teaching a series of philosophical (non-religious) arguments for God's existence.

In the next section of this course I will teach what many believe is the strongest atheistic-philosophical argument against God's existence; viz., The Argument from Evil Against the Existence of God.

 University of Notre Dame analytic philosopher Peter van Inwagen, in The Problem of Evil, writes: "I am going to discuss the argument from evil, the most important argument for the non-existence of that Being whose existence and attributes are said to be the province of natural theology." (2) Van Inwagen concludes that "the argument from evil is a failure." (Ib.) I'm now reading van Inwagen's deep philosophical text on this argument as a way of continuing education, for my own growth and understanding.

Philosophy of Religion Oral Exams

For my MCCC Philosophy of Religion students:

Tomorrow's oral exams (Oct. 4) will be in room A-153.

Tuesday's oral exams (Oct. 9) will be in room A-173.

The Questions

1. Explain Anselm's Ontological Argument for God's existence.
2. Explain Gaunilo's criticism of Anselm; plus our critique of Gaunilo.
3. Explain Kant's criticism of the Ontological Argument; plus Malcolm's response to Kant.
4. Explain Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument for God's existence.
5. Explain Collins's Fine-tuning Argument for the existence of God.