Other non-human animals, I think we should give them moral consideration based on their capacity for experience as well. And I think that that does mean that we shouldn't treat a microbe similarly to the way we treat a cat or a dog, similarly to the way we treat an ape, similarly to the way we treat a human. And it's precisely that capacity for different levels of experience, the complex cognitive capacities that we have that enable us to make those moral judgments. It does mean if I became convinced that something that looked like a person actually had no interiority and was not a person, it would not be immoral to end their life. Right? That does follow from my position.
SPEAKER_01Last week, a Christian and a humanist debated a pragmatist. I'm Glenn Scrivener, I was the Christian and Humanist, and my contention in this video is that James Croft is not a humanist and should probably hand back in his humanist card. We'll see why in just a minute. We debated the question, is Christianity the air we breathe? Which is named after the title of my 2022 book, The Air We Breathe. Here is my argument in a nutshell. My point this evening is that the West in particular has been Christianized in a certain way. My point is not that Christianity depends on the West. It really doesn't. I do think the West depends on Christianity. And I do think that the Christian tradition and 2,000 years of Christianization has shaped the West and has been the predominant shaper and influencer on the West. Not to deny that there have been other tributaries into Western civilization. But Christianity has the greatest say among those tributaries. It also has tended to shape the way that we view those other influences on the West. Such that even as we reach for examples in other cultures of the ethics and the virtues, the values that we admire, we tend to do that through Christian spectacles. And I mean that, even if you've never set foot inside a church, even if you've never opened the Bible, I do think that we in the West tend to be a lot more Christian than we have ever imagined. That's my argument, and then I throw in another argument that Christianity is itself our foundation for humanism. Christian humanism goes back centuries. You might have heard of Martin Luther King. You might have heard of C.S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien, you might have heard of G. K. Chesterton. You might have heard of Calvin or Erasmus or any number of Christians who are also very happy to own the term humanist. I am a Christian humanist. And I think that God the human, Jesus Christ, is the foundation, really, for believing that human value, human dignity is supreme in that way. So, two humanists, I invite you to become Christians. And to Christians, I invite you to be humanists. Thank you. And I might add that if you jettison Christianity, you will find it very difficult to hold on to humanism. James himself finds it very difficult to hold on to humanism, as we'll see. James then spoke and did a wonderful job of bringing three critiques to my thesis. If you think Christianity is the air we breathe in the West, well, what about pre-Christian sources of moral values? What about anti-Christian sources of moral values? And what about non-Christian sources of moral values? Here's his example of pre-Christian sources of moral value.
SPEAKER_03Watch him there working on a patient. He has a wise, wrinkled brow and a full curly beard, such a magnificent beard, a beard to envy. His name is Hippocrates, one of the first people to take a systematic approach to medical science. And his example gave rise to a whole genre of ancient Greek writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus and the related medical texts, which record the thoughts of the leading medics of the ancient Greek world. He's perhaps most well known today for formulating, probably only in legend though, the Hippocratic Oath, a vow which medics at the time were asked to take and which informs our medical ethics to this day.
SPEAKER_01And what has passed down to us from Hippocrates has largely come through medieval Christendom and the preservation of ancient texts that monks were copying out over centuries and centuries. What we know of such pre-Christian sources is largely the result of the preservation of such texts because medieval Christendom valued such texts so very, very much. And what did they and we love so much about Hippocrates? Well, let's hear it from James.
SPEAKER_03One scholar of ancient Greece, H. C. Baldry, observes that the Hippocratic Oath promised proper treatment of all patients, female and male, free and slave. And medical notes from the time confirm this. At least according to some of the writers of the medical texts, treatment was offered to everyone, regardless of their identity or place in society.
SPEAKER_01It's like this precursor to the NHS, free at the point of access, it really chimes with our egalitarian beliefs in the equal moral dignity of all people and the right of all people to a certain kind of compassion. Now, was the Hippocratic way of seeing humanity the common way of understanding humanity in ancient Greece? James is very clear, no.
SPEAKER_03It is of course true that this universal humanitarian ethic did not suffuse all of ancient Greek society. In fact, it seems to have been a peculiarity of Hippocrates and some small groups of philosophers and their followers.
SPEAKER_01So why is James reaching for a minority report from a two and a half thousand-year-old civilization? It did not determine the values of ancient Greece, let alone the values of us. This is what I say to James about this issue of pre-Christian values. There are values that resonate hugely with a Christianized culture and that we can applaud and that we ought to applaud wherever we find it, no matter what the source is. But I'm just not sure when you raise those who are a peculiar sect within a greater culture from two and a half thousand years ago, what impact do you think they have on the year of our Lord 2025? In the year of our Lord 2025, we look back at Hippocrates and we like Hippocrates because we've been shaped by two millennia of Christianization. So of course we like his egalitarianism, and we do not like it when Plato, for instance, says that humans are some gold, some silver, some bronze, some iron. Some are fitted to rule, some are fitted to be ruled over, some are born simply to be human tools, which is what both Plato and Aristotle called slaves. We look back and we think that Plato and Aristotle are obviously wrong about the question of slavery, but in their own culture they were not. We are looking back through Christianized lenses. And this is my issue about pre-Christian sources of our contemporary values. The reason why we reach for Hippocrates and not Plato on this issue is because of Christianity. The reason why we like the Hippocratic Oath and we don't like Spartans throwing the malformed and girls down wells, the reason why we might like a Buddhist kind of understanding of compassion rather than the martial glory of Rome necessarily, is because of Christianization. I think that's utterly obvious. And by the way, what percentage of our moral sensibilities have been shaped by Hippocrates or Sophocles in the more egalitarian moments, or by Buddhists or Confucianists, like what proportion? And James fails to answer that question. And so there is a mix, you know, there's whatever it is, 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen and you know, fractions of a percent with carbon dioxide and things like that. So what percentage? Um I knew you were gonna ask me this.
SPEAKER_03The moment I decided to use that metaphor, extend that metaphor, I was like, he's gonna ask what percentage is each bit.
SPEAKER_01Pre-Christian and non-Christian influences on the West are a vanishingly small proportion of what has actually shaped our moral sensibilities. What has actually shaped our moral sensibilities has been Christianity. And the reason why we reach for certain cultures and certain instantiations of egalitarianism and not other instantiations of cruelty and martial valor and slaveholding and hierarchy. The reason why we like certain things from non-Christian and pre-Christian cultures and dislike other things from non-Christian and pre-Christian cultures is because of Christianization. I think the thesis still stands. Now, James goes on to a second challenge to my thesis. He looks at anti-Christian sources of contemporary moral values, and he points to the example of Thomas Paine. Thomas Paine.
SPEAKER_03Now, Paine was known for his fiery quill. He was an author, sounds a bit wrong now. I say it. He was an author, a magazine editor, an essayist. He most likely penned an anonymous essay decrying the execrable commerce of slavery and calling for its abolition. But it was his pamphlets, especially one called Common Sense, that cemented him as one of the most influential figures of the modern age. He was staunchly anti-monarchist, pro-democracy. He advocated that men who were not property owners should still be able to vote, which was radical at the time and fiercely abolitionist. Paine wrote reams of arguments against arbitrary authority and in favor of a people's right to govern themselves, becoming one of the early heroes and inspirations for the American Revolution. Paine was also a staunch deist, meaning that he did not believe in a personal God, and he was deeply critical of all religious institutions, including Christianity. In the age of reason, he wrote, and I absolutely love this quote I do not believe in the creed professed by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelented vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. For my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. And you thought Richard Dawkins was tough on God.
SPEAKER_01In the Age of Reason, Thomas Paine did the classically hyper-Protestant move of looking back at medieval Christendom and seeing only darkness. It was an age of faith. We have now come through into an age of reason. Do you see this darkness to light story that he tells? In the Age of Reason, he looks back at medieval Christendom and he calls it a vast sandy desert in which not a shrub appears to intercept the vision to the fertile hills beyond. He wants to escape from medieval Christendom and he thinks of that as the desert, but he is on his way to the promised land. Do you see how he cannot escape, actually, Christian ideas, Christian concepts, from darkness to light? From the wilderness wanderings and into the promised land, Thomas Paine was utterly shaped by Christian presuppositions, utterly shaped by Christian assumptions. Even in the ways in which he opposed the Bible and the church, he was doing so for some profoundly Christian reasons. His most influential pamphlet was probably The Rights of Man, in which, as a deist, he believes in natural law and natural rights that all humans possess by virtue of God's existence and by virtue of the fact that we all possess a soul. Towards the end of his life, Thomas Paine said, I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of humans, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy, which is of course a riff on Micah chapter six, to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Paine believes in God, and God is absolutely central to his belief in natural rights. His belief in God and his belief in souls is at the heart of his political project, even. He, together with John Locke, were massive influences on Thomas Jefferson and other framers of the Declaration of Independence. But John Locke was explicit about the Christian influence on a theory of rights. Pain, coming a little later, tries to do it with just his deism. Thomas Jefferson says in the Declaration of Independence, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That's what Thomas Jefferson said. Benjamin Franklin, who didn't like the word sacred, said, let's get rid of the words sacred and undeniable and just say that they're self-evident. And that somehow reason has gotten us to a belief in human rights. Of course that is utter nonsense. Don't take my word for it, here's what Yovan Noah Harari, not a fan of Christianity, has to say. The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are equal? Friedrich Nietzsche looked back at this whole idea of rights, and he, along with many other people, has found the idea of rights to be utterly nonsensical and to be bound up with this silly Christian superstition. And if we get rid of the silly Christian superstition, we have to get rid of things like human rights. Hear what Friedrich Nietzsche said. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident, Benjamin Franklin. This point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads, like Thomas Paine and other humanists who think that you can get rid of God and still hold on to something like the Christian morality. They are just English flatheads, says Friedrich Nietzsche. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things, thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. Nothing necessary remains in one's hands. When the English actually believe that they know intuitively what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment, and the expression of the strength and depth of this dominion, that it is the air we breathe. Right? That's what Friedrich Nietzsche is saying. There's lots I disagree with about Friedrich Nietzsche. He's right about this. Such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its rights to exist is no longer felt. The rights of man is a natural law kind of argument for human rights that depends on theological presuppositions. Get rid of the theology and you no longer get the morality. So is Thomas Paine an example of an anti-Christian? He's not anti-Christian enough according to Friedrich Nietzsche. And if we don't like Nietzsche and Nietzschean ethics, and if we do like human rights, then I guess A, we're going to need Christianity, and B, all of this proves that it's Christianity that is shaping our moral assumptions the whole time. Here's James Croft's third critique. There are non-Christian sources of our contemporary moral values, and he points to P. C. Chang, one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
SPEAKER_03Historians and scholars of human rights accept that there were numerous figures who influenced what became the final draft of the Declaration. But for the sake of time this evening, I'm going to focus just on two people, the most important, Charles Malik and P. C. Chang. Now, Malik was a Greek Orthodox Christian born in Lebanon, a diplomat and philosopher with a view of human rights firmly grounded in a Christian metaphysical set of assumptions, including the idea that our rights are a matter of natural law grounded by God. So he was sort of Glenn's guy, right? Chang was born in Tianjin, China, and was a quintessential Renaissance man, a playwright, a philosopher, an activist, super snappy dresser. Look up his young headshot on Google. He looks fine. He's amazing looking. And Chang thought that human rights could be grounded in a variety of metaphysical systems and stem from a range of cultural sources. And he defended a pluralistic, broadly secular approach to human rights. So you had a strict orthodox Christian natural law theorist in Charles Malik, you had a pragmatist, pluralist Confucian in PC Chang on the other, and they fought. If you read the accounts of the debates they had when drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they sometimes seem like a two-person play with just Malik and Chang going at it at each other, each advocating their own philosophical view. In the end, rather than the metaphysically specific, explicitly religious, Christian-informed document Malik wanted, we got a universal declaration which is secular, pluralist, and capable of endorsement from a variety of religious and non-religious perspectives. The UDHR did not include any reference to an explicit metaphysical grounding of rights. It was not grounded in Christian ideas of natural law, at least explicitly. It did not once mention God. And the reward was that it was almost unanimously adopted by every member of the United Nations. And here's the really cool thing, for my argument. After growing up in China, Chiang went to Columbia University in New York, where he studied under probably the world's most famous philosopher at the time, John Dewey. Dewey, one of the most influential and eloquent defenders of contemporary humanism ever. So the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we benefit from today was informed primarily by philosophical insights, not of a Western Christian, but of a Chinese Confucian humanist. You see, Chang is a non-Christian source of today's moral values.
SPEAKER_01It was very important for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be endorsed by all nations. A lot of Muslim countries did not sign the document because, for instance, freedom of religion is not something that they could sign up to. But the League of Nations after World War I failed. How do we know it failed? Because there was World War II. So after World War II, we really wanted a League of Nations 2.0. It is pragmatically very necessary to get the whole world on board with something that's going to hold us together. What is that something? Well, in 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter. It was on this basis that America entered the war. Here's what it said. The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, representing his Majesty's government in the United Kingdom being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries, on which they base their hopes for a better future of the world. First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other. Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned. The Atlantic Charter was all about a post-war world beyond the Nazi tyranny, which means that all of the nations of the world for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. In 1942, on the anniversary of the signing of the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt said this about why they, i.e., the United States and the Allies, were entering the war. They have formed a great union of humanity dedicated to the realization of that common program of purposes and principles set forth in the Atlantic Charter through worldwide victory over their common enemies, their faith in life, liberty and independence and religious freedom and in the preservation of human rights and justice in their own as well as in other lands has been given form and substance as the United Nations. Life, liberty, independence, and religious freedoms. Where did he get these ideas from? They have an intellectual genealogy, and that genealogy traces back to 1776, and 1776 traces back to John Locke, and John Locke traces back to Aquinas and traces back to the Justinian Code and traces back to Scripture, traces back to a very Christian understanding of things. The United Nations was an inevitability as soon as America joined the war, as soon as Russia helped the Allies to win, there was going to be a United Nations that was going to do the League of Nations 2.0 that was going to uphold human rights in a particularly 1776 kind of a frame. And where did all these things come from? The Charter of the United Nations was signed in 1945. In San Francisco, the headquarters were put in New York City, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was going to happen no matter what. They invited P. C. Chang, who was a wonderful Renaissance man. He was invited into this kind of setting. Did he have influence on the shaping of the UDHR? Sure. Was his Confucianism a source of contemporary Western values? Absolutely not. Which is a separate question from could Confucianism come up with its own declaration of human rights? Maybe it could, but that is not at all the burden of my thesis. My thesis is that Christianity is the air that we breathe. And the percentage of Confucianism within the Western atmosphere is so close to zero it makes no odds. But I do want to commend James for raising PC Chang. I think it's a profoundly Christian thing to do, to look at non-Christian examples of morality and hold them up as exemplars. We've been doing that since the Good Samaritan. The Good Samaritan in Luke chapter 10 is Jesus' story of the greatest exemplar of compassion in all of Scripture. And he's not from the biblical nation, and he's not from the biblical religion. He's a guy from another religion, is the exemplar of compassion. And I think it's a profoundly Christian thing to do, to point to wonderful exemplars of compassion that are all over the world and are there to be seen, as Jesus encouraged us to see. See them, but we we will see them through certain spectacles that like the egalitarianism and the compassionate ethics of aspects of Confucianism, but dislike the martial glory of the Spartans, okay? PC Chang gets a seat at the table and can shape things and shape things really helpfully. But there are other people who do not get a seat at that table. Why? Who are the gatekeepers of that table? Well, geopolitically, the gatekeepers of that table were, to begin with, the Allies. Then pragmatically it's extended out to the Security Council in which the Chinese and the Russians and the French and the British and the Americans sort of sit there. So pragmatically and geopolitically there are gatekeepers to that table. But standing behind all those questions is a moral system that is adjudicating in favor of human rights. And that system that supports human rights by which we adjudicate who gets a seat at the table, that is a profoundly Christianized understanding of humanity, of the good life, of the moral character of this universe. James raises exactly the right three critiques of my thesis. The pre-Christian, the anti-Christian, the non-Christian. I don't think any of those critiques actually succeed though. But what I want to do at the end of this is ask James three questions. And question number one I want to ask to James is where do you get your morality from? The very first question in QA, somebody asked me about the Euthyphro dilemma. He phrased it like this.
SPEAKER_00Plato's dilemma. I wonder if you could comment on it. So is something good because God says it's good? Or does God say something is good because it is good? If one, that means it's an arbitrary process, and we're subject to the caprice of a God who might decide at one point that child sacrifice is acceptable and another point that it isn't. If two uh if uh if something is good if something if d sorry does God say something is good because it is good, then we don't need God.
SPEAKER_01And here's how I summarized it. So that's the final dialogue of Socrates and Euthyphro, and often known as the Euthyphro dilemma. Um and I think it's a dilemma both for religious believers and for atheists and agnostics as well, and I'll I'll say why in a second. But uh so you're sort of on the horns of a dilemma, right? If you say that something is good only because the gods say that it's good, um, then it seems incredibly arbitrary, doesn't it? Um uh or is it is it good in and of itself, and the gods can do nothing but recognize the inherent goodness in it, and then what's what's what's the purpose of that goodness? I should have said, what's the purpose of the gods in that case? But now Plato himself had um an answer to this own to this this kind of dilemma, which for for Plato was the good is itself goodness, and in in that sense, he he really kind of believed in you know the good with a capital G. Um we we might say God is goodness, I think is is a Platonist's way of kind of refusing the dilemma. God himself is goodness. I don't know how satisfying people in this room find that. I actually don't find that very satisfying until you do that move that I mentioned earlier that uh the Jews and the Christians uh around the dot were interacting with a lot of Platonists and Neoplatonists, and they were introducing people to the one who is goodness himself, who is a person who is himself capable of morally valent kind of behavior. And in the Trinitarian frame of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then the God who is goodness is love. A father loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit, and that to me, I think, escapes the arbitrariness of Plato's answer, in which God simply is goodness. There is something non-arbitrary about the fact of a father loving the son in the joy of the Holy Spirit is an ethical community. Before the world began, there was an ethical community of love, which is the highest ethic you can possibly have. And so I think God is goodness because God is love, and to the degree that we approximate a life of love, then that's what we call good. And at that point, I don't find that arbitrary, which is what some people say when you reflect refuse the dilemma. I don't I don't find that arbitrary. I I actually find that quite beautiful, but I would say that the atheist also has to answer the euthyphro dilemma, because if our creator is natural selection, now is natural selection simply selecting for ethical goodness, or is whatever natural selection selects morally good? Which way do you go on that one, James?
SPEAKER_03Well, firstly, I agree with you when you say that we won't find your answer to the dilemma convincing. I don't find it convincing. I think that actually it's a well-posed dilemma, and I I've never read a response to it that I found particularly convincing. Um and I th I don't think I honestly don't think bringing I think it's I think it's cute. I don't mean to I genuinely think it's cute to answer a uh an uh a evolutionary version of the dilemma, but I don't think it really works as a dilemma. Um why not? Uh because natural selection doesn't select for ethical goodness and it's not good. It's just a natural process that's happening. There is no ethical dimension to natural selection at all. It has no, I mean, it's just not an ethically involved process.
SPEAKER_01James wants to have a morality, but there's nothing actually moral about the nature that has formed us. So where does he get his morality from? I offer him one option, maybe maybe he's a Platonist. So therefore, are you more platonic in terms of you think there is goodness outside of the natural realm?
SPEAKER_03No, no, I don't think. So there's no goodness outside of the natural realm. Do you think it has anything to do with natural selection?
SPEAKER_01So there is no goodness above the natural realm, and the natural realm is itself not moral. So where's James going to go here?
SPEAKER_03I think that natural selection selects for the ability of organisms to survive and therefore reproduce. That's all that natural selection wants. And I hate using teleological language to talk about natural selection because it's not, in my view, teleological processes. It doesn't want anything, it's just something that happens. But it has no moral dimension, right? And the reason why it has no moral dimension is because there's no agent to making the choices, right? No one is choosing, oh, this frog lives, this frog dies, from my perspective. It's just what happens. The whole point of the idea of natural selection is to remove the agent from the process. And when you don't have an agent, you don't have morality, right? There's no morality needs agents to exist. So I don't think it's a moral process at all. So I guess I don't I don't understand the question.
SPEAKER_01So our creator in that sense is non-personal and amoral. And there are no other sources of morality. The only source of morality must be agents, but those agents have been formed by non-agential amoral forces. So again, where does morality come from? Well, therefore, where why should you not simply follow natural selection in a Nietzschean frame and just say pity thwarts the law of selection, which is the law of evolution?
SPEAKER_03But why should you? Right?
SPEAKER_01Because it's your creator. I think Nietzsche is consistent here. Our creator is amoral, and we have emerged from natural selection. But why should we not simply follow natural selection rather than go against it? Why go against the grain of reality? You're gonna get splinters, aren't you? What on what basis are we going to be unnatural and prize things like equality and compassion? What does James say?
SPEAKER_03But well, Nietzsche, if he wants us to follow his normative prescriptions, has to argue for them just as everybody else. He can't it's not a normatively convincing argument to say, well, nature does this, so we should do it.
SPEAKER_01Ah, yes, so it's a law of the jungle. So Nietzsche makes his argument that we should follow natural selection, and somebody over here, a humanist who's an atheist, wants to make some kind of argument for compassion and equality, and they need to make their cases. But what is it that adjudicates and says that there's something up here that says the humanist is right and the Nietzschean is wrong? There is nothing in James' system, and therefore, who is going to win in that squabble about the true nature of morality? I mean everyone can see the flaw in that reasoning.
SPEAKER_03So I I don't find it a particularly challenging.
SPEAKER_01But there is no realm beyond nature.
SPEAKER_03No, that I think actually I'm a pre I'm a weird sort of humanist in that I don't even like to call myself a naturalist because I don't think the concept of the supernatural makes it is sensible at all. I don't think it makes any sense. I think it is logically inconceivable. I think that there can only be the natural. Everything that is is natural. Right. And I think that that that that actually there's a conceptual incoherence in the idea of the supernatural.
SPEAKER_01That's great, but then you also give up morality. A a morality that is not what nature selects. Now you could be Nietzsche and you could say goodness is what evolution selects, which is basically what he does do. Okay, and he says that is what ethics is. Okay, so Nietzsche, in that naturalistic frame, holds on to an account of morality. James does not think that that is moral, but he also doesn't have a category for the supernatural. So where does his morality come from? And why is it superior to Nietzsche's? But what nature selects for is not pity, it's not compassion, it's not the inviolable worth and dignity of people. Correct. And nature is all there is. Yes. So where where is this moral judgment? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So great question. If all that had evolved on this planet had been like tadpoles, and that was the extent that life got to, it went from amoebas to something like tadpoles, there would be no ethics in the universe. We would live in an ethics-free universe. I think that's pretty obvious. And I think if the globe was wiped out tomorrow by some horrible disaster, and there were no there was no life left on it, and there was no life in the universe, there would be no ethics in the universe. Ethics is something that happens when organisms with the capacity for valenced experience are in community with each other. I think that it's very doubtful that there would be any such thing as ethics if there was only one person living on the earth. Some people disagree and they say people might have ethical responsibilities to themselves. I'm not sure about that. I I could go either way on that one, but I'm quite confident saying there would be no ethics if there was nothing capable of thinking about their own behavior.
SPEAKER_01So ethics is what rational people make of it. And at that point, ethics is what the strong do. Which is precisely Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, that it was basically the powerful who are telling us all to be serfs and to live in servitude to this God and to make weakness into some kind of virtue. The strong were telling you to behave in those sorts of ways, but it was a power play. And if it's a power play, then Nietzsche just says, well, be stronger than that and become overmen. I'd love to hear from you, James, why a humanist morality is superior to somebody who wants to jettison equality and compassion. Especially if you think that natural selection does not select for those things, and nature is all we are, and there is no supernatural realm. Help square that circle for me. That's question number one. Where is your morality from? Secondly, which ethical system actually makes more sense? James puts the challenge that he's got his ethical system, I've got my ethical system, and that there's nothing that would potentially recommend the Christian moral system and metaphysic over his moral system and metaphysic. That is not obvious to me. As I say, in the Trinitarian frame of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then the God who is goodness is love. A father loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit. And that to me, I think, escapes the arbitrariness of Plato's answer, in which God simply is goodness. There is something non-arbitrary about the fact of a father loving the son in the joy of the Holy Spirit is an ethical community. Before the world began, there was an ethical community of love, which is the highest ethic you can possibly have. And so I think God is goodness because God is love. And to the degree that we approximate a life of love, then that's what we call good. Reality is an ethical realm. Ultimate reality is love. Those who live in love live in God and God lives in them. Um, that that is the Christian metaphysic and the Christian morality. James says we have emerged utterly from amorality, and those who are rational enough among us can live in an ethical manner that is quite at odds with the natural selection that gave rise to them. It seems to me that you are working against your creator to be moral in that system. Whereas I think in the Christian system, you are working with your creator in order to be moral. Which ethical system makes more sense? You might not buy the Christian metaphysic, but I think the Christian metaphysic and the Christian morality work together hand in glove. The atheist metaphysic and the humanist morality are totally at odds with each other. And that's my third challenge for James. My third challenge for you, James, is are you actually a humanist? In our open discussion time, Daniel, the moderator, asked a question of James and it became quite clarifying. He asked this.
SPEAKER_02Can I ask you one just to get the conversation going? Yeah. Cool. Um, your discussion uh or your thought process on morality, it sounds like fundamentally comes down to the fact that ultimately, if you do something to somebody, that might happen to you later down the line and negatively impact your valence. Is that correct? And James goes on to say this.
SPEAKER_03Well, it's a bit, it's a little less like, oh, if I do that to you, they might do it to me. It's not quite as um, I don't, I'm not quite getting the right word for that. It's not, it's not quite as yeah, tit for tat as that. It's more like it's irrational, it's fundamentally irrational for me to care about my own valence experience, which is inherent to my nature. I can't not care about it, and deny consideration of others, because that opens the possibility of them denying the value of my experience, and that is irrational. It's not about the the doing a particular thing to them that they might do to you, it's more about undermining the rational appreciation of the mutuality of our experience.
SPEAKER_02Does that mean that fundamentally, if you were in a forest with another human being and you knew guaranteed that there was absolutely no way that anybody would find out and ever pay back the fact that you're about to shoot him?
SPEAKER_03No, no, that's it. Would that be moral? Would that be immoral? Right? Because it would be irrational in the sense of it would essentially undermine my own appreciation of my own experience, right? The it it it is it would be irrational. It's not about the effects to society of people doing this, it's not about what they might do back to you, it is about living consistently with one owns experience of the world. It does mean, and this is again me causing problems for myself by being a philosopher and actually trying to answer the question. It does mean if I became convinced that something that looked like a person actually had no interiority and was not a person, it would not be immoral to end their life. Right? That does follow from my position.
SPEAKER_01That is to conflate two different ideas of the word value. I can value things as a verb that is different from my value as a noun. And if you really tie my value to my evaluative capacities, you have just destroyed human equality. James has destroyed human equality. You have to earn the right to your human value and dignity. Those who are able to evaluate the world via ethical reasoning have value. If you can value, then you have value in James' system. In the Christian system, you have value by rights. You have value by virtue of being a member of the human family. And there are hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of humans on the planet right now who do not have the same evaluative, ethical, moral reasoning capabilities as James and I and Daniel have, and others who came to the University of Sussex meeting house. James will accord you value if you can evaluate things morally and ethically. That excludes the mentally handicapped. That excludes the senile dementia patients. That excludes infants. And I'd really love to know from James, can you tell me at what age you have such evaluative capacities such that you'll be granted a human value and worth, on James's view. And I'm fairly certain that James means to exclude the unborn in his concept of equality. He means to. They do not have the capacities that James thinks confers moral worth and dignity on you. At which point I say to James, return your humanist card. You need to become a Christian to be a humanist. And if anything was going to prove my thesis on the night, I think it's the fact that James spent the night pulled in two different directions. He was pulled in a secular direction, he was pulled in an atheistic direction on the one hand, but he wanted to appear humanist. He wanted to appear as though equality and compassion and human rights were supreme virtues and values for him. But by the end of the night it became obvious. Secular, humanist, pick one. You cannot have both. And James's struggle between the secular side of him and the humanist side of him is what the West's struggle is right now. Yeah, absolutely. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a pragmatic post-war document that's trying to give a Christian-ish morality to a world order, but it doesn't ground it with transcendent ideals about humanity. James is right when he says this.
SPEAKER_03It is explicitly not how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights talks about rights, for instance. It does not claim that human beings are transcendent and separate from the rest of reality. That language was advocated for by people like Charles Malik, who felt, like Glenn, that it was essential to have a metaphysical grounding like that in order to advance the ideals of human rights.
SPEAKER_01Yes, Christians like Charles Malik and I do believe that the human rights discourse needs a metaphysical underpinning. And we're very aware that so much of the discourse is held in a secular register in order to make it more broadly appealing to a wider group of people. But there is in fact a Christian metaphysical underpinning to the very concept of natural law, natural rights, and human rights. And surely having a metaphysical underpinning would strengthen human rights rather than weaken them. That's my position. Here's what James says. But other people like Chang said, no, it's not.
SPEAKER_03We don't need that sort of language in this document. And in fact, it would undermine the success of it as an international document because it would prevent people who have different metaphysical assumptions from signing on to it. I think it's pretty clear who's correct about that. The profound success of the idea of human rights is partly because it refused to engage in the sort of theological language that Glenn has just imposed upon it.
SPEAKER_01It was pragmatically successful to put a profoundly Christian doctrine into secular language to make it appeal to a broad base. That's pragmatically successful. But just listen to what James says next.
SPEAKER_03And I think that at a time when human rights are backsliding all over the world, it's incredibly important that we reinforce the pluralistic message that you can actually ground the idea of human rights, not just get to them, but ground them in a respectable way from many different religious and non-religious perspectives.
SPEAKER_01Human rights are backsliding. So we need an underpinning. But what is your underpinning? It can't be the Christian one, says James, but I have no evidence from what James has said that he has an alternative underpinning to human rights. And he's worried that human rights discourse is eroding and we're backsliding on this issue of human rights. What do we need? We we need an ethical underpinning, don't we? And that's precisely what Christians are offering. So I think James is an avatar. He is this secular humanist, and the secular side of him is pulling in one direction, the humanist side of him is pulling in a different direction, and really he needs to pick a side. In order to pick the humanist side, I think he needs to become a Christian. Every year, 73 million unborn members of the human family are killed on this planet. Only 60 million people die. Once they get through the birth canal and out onto planet Earth, 60 million of us die every year. 73 million of us we put to death intentionally in the womb. But on James's system, it's not just the unborn. I would also say infants do not have the same capacities that you or I have for evaluative reasoning. They would lack worth and dignity on James' system. The mentally handicapped do the senile dementia patients are Alzheimer's patients. There are hundreds of millions of humans on planet Earth that James does not think have moral worth and dignity. And it would be permissible on his system, if I'm hearing you right, James, is this right? It is permissible on your moral system that you could end their lives. All of those people, because none of them surely have sufficient capacities to be able to evaluate. And James, having conflated the noun of value with the verb of value, because he's conflated those things, only those who can evaluate have value. And James needs to hand in his humanist card. Those are my three challenges back to James. Love to hear what he thinks about my three responses to his critiques. Love to hear what he thinks about those three challenges. And if you've been following along, love to hear what you think as well in the comments. Why don't you give the channel a like and a subscribe? And we'll see you on the next one. Bye bye.