Love versus platitudes

APOLOGIA

By Hendrik van der Breggen

The Carillon, July21, 2106

Love versus platitudes

Love is important. Jesus clearly tells us that the greatest command is to love God and that the second greatest command is to love our neighbours—and that these commands sum up the law and prophets.

Scripture as well as popular culture also tell us that love is a verb: love involves action. I've even heard it said that beliefs don't make you a better or loving person, it's doing that matters.

An internet meme goes so far as to sum up the popular view of love this way: “It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love, or how you love, it matters only that you love.” After all, according to gay pride placards, “love is love is love.”

But wait. Are we being misled by platitudes? [A platitude is a commonplace, shallow, trite remark that verges on being meaningless; sometimes described as a thought-terminating cliché.]

Love is important, and so is action. I don't deny this. But moral content is important, too.

Pause with me, and think.

First, what about the claim that it’s not what you believe but what you do that makes you a better/loving person? Answer: On its own, it lacks sense.

Making sense of this claim depends on what one believes a better or loving person is. Making sense of this claim depends on what one believes is behaviour a better or loving person ought to do. It depends on what one believes matters.

If you're not convinced, consider this: Ted Bundy (rapist and murderer of more than 20 women) believed what matters is to be daring and willing to rape and murder. Or think about the beliefs of ISIS.

Ideas have consequences, in other words. What's believed is crucial.

Still not convinced?

Consider this: “I love you,” said the married businessman to his secretary, as the businessman abandons his young children along with his wife who is dying of cancer.

“I love you,” said the pedophile to the child.

“I love you,” said the zoophile to his dog.

“I love you,” said the sadist to his torture victims.

“I love you,” said the masochist to encourage her abuser.

Clearly, we must define “love.” Love has a moral structure. A belief content. A truth content.

Philosopher David Horner: “what we believe will determine how we behave, and ultimately who we become.”

This means that if we seek to love truly, we should discern—and believe—what is truly right and good and excellent and praiseworthy.

Of course, beliefs not acted upon don't amount to much. To paraphrase the Apostle James: belief without behaviour is dead. But we should also add the whole counsel of Scripture (and reason): behaviour without belief is blind.

Jesus, whom Christians believe is God come to Earth as a human being, teaches that love is of utmost importance. He also teaches us what real love means: to believe and follow Him.

It turns out that following Jesus involves respecting moral law.

Really? Yes.

Jesus fulfilled the law, but He didn't abolish it. Jesus set aside the ceremonial and ritual law, but not the moral law.

Jesus even says things like, “you’ve heard you shouldn't commit adultery, but I’m telling you that you shouldn't even think about committing adultery.” Jesus intensifies the moral law.

(Yes, Jesus forgives the woman caught in adultery, but He also tells her to stop sinning.)

Clearly, for Jesus, love involves holiness—which involves obeying moral truth.

Now, in view of Steinbach's recent gay pride parade, consider this: Jesus taught that among the things that defile is porneia, i.e., sexual immorality (Matthew 15:19, Mark 7:21). Porneia is a Greek catch-all term (from which the English “pornography” comes) which, in Jesus' Jewish context, includes any sexual activity outside marriage between one man and one woman.

Yes, love is love is love. But this is like saying X=X=X, which is a mere principle of logic (the principle of identity). So what is X? What is love?

Is love whatever makes me feel good? Or is there moral truth to love, by which I must judge my feelings?

(Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, teaches philosophy at Providence University College. The views expressed in this column do not always reflect the views of Providence.)

Other Apologia columns on related matters for further reading (please read these first, along with my critics' comments plus my replies to critics, before offering a criticism):

Bible and homosexuality 

• Jesus and homosexuality
• Homosexuality and history
• Debunking Internet Arguments: Bible and Homosexuality
• For the Bible tells me so – Critical Review
• Evangelical Christian Gay-Straight Alliance Club?
• The Golden Rule

Non-religious philosophical criticisms 

• Lady Gaga and moral reasoning
• Is being gay like race?
• Homophobia, bigotry, intolerance?
• It's all society's fault?
• Born gay?
• Think for baby's sake
• Careful thinking
• Reductio ad absurdum
• Is promoting same-sex sex wise?

Same-sex marriage

• Questioning same-sex marriage
• Same-sex marriage, Subway sandwiches

Politics

• Pride Parade pros and cons
• Politically Incorrect Thoughts: Orlando massacre, HSD and LGBTQ
• Thoughtcrimes
• Phobia-label fear
• Men in women's bathrooms?
• Bill 18 needs revision

 Replies to my critics

• Questioning a critic's credibility
• A critical review of a critic's work

Are Morals Wholly Subjective?

Ted Bundy in custody

APOLOGIA 

By Hendrik van der Breggen
The Carillon, February 25, 2010

Are morals wholly subjective?

A few weeks ago in Apologia, I examined a presently popular view of ethics known as moral relativism. According to moral relativism, there are no moral principles or values objectively real and applicable to everyone; rather, what’s right/wrong or good/bad essentially depends on individual preference or culture, and this varies from person to person or group to group.

I evaluated moral relativism via an argument strategy known as reductio ad absurdum or the absurd consequences move. That is, to show that moral relativism is problematic, I assumed, temporarily for the sake of argument, that the view is true. If the logical consequences of the assumed truth of moral relativism are false or otherwise deeply problematic, then it follows logically that moral relativism is false or otherwise deeply problematic, or both.

I then set out various logical consequences that are false or otherwise deeply problematic. Hence, I concluded, there are good reasons for rejecting moral relativism. (For a review, see here and here.)

I think that my reductio ad absurdum arguments are strong (from the point of view of good reasoning and truth). Nevertheless, I would like to add one more argument against moral relativism, especially in its individualistic form (a.k.a. moral subjectivism), as a reply to those persons who still might think that we needn’t be concerned about whether morality is wholly subjective.

More specifically, I wish to respond to the shoulder-shrugging dismissive attitude toward careful moral thinking summed up in the all-too-popular mind-numbing mantra “whatever.”

Here, then, is my response. It’s a paraphrase of a tape-recorded conversation between serial murderer Ted Bundy and one of his victims:

"Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective, and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ I even read somewhere that the Chief Justice of the United States had written that the American Constitution expressed nothing more than collective value judgments.

“Believe it or not, I figured out for myself—what apparently the Chief Justice couldn’t figure out for himself—that if the rationality of one value judgment was zero, multiplying it by millions would not make it one whit more rational. Nor is there any ‘reason’ to obey the law for anyone, like myself, who has the boldness and daring—the strength of character—to throw off its shackles….I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited.

“And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable ‘value judgment’ that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings, with human rights?

“Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’?

“In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure that I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me—after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self."

[Ted Bundy (proponent of wholly subjective ethics and murderer of at least 20 women), cited in Louis P. Pojman, Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong, 3rd edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson, 1999), 31-32.]

Surely, we should be concerned when right and wrong are alleged to be wholly subjective. Surely, too, shrugging off careful moral thinking with “whatever” is socially irresponsible as well as morally repugnant.

Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, teaches philosophy at Providence College, Otterburne, Manitoba. The views in this column do not always reflect the views of Providence.