Polkinghorne's Perspective on Science and Religion - Reflection on "Quarks, Chaos and Christianity" by John Polkinghorne

I read this book earlier than I had planned to (January as opposed to July) because I have gone through my January reading list, and also because the title intrigued me: I have long retorted to the claim that I believe in some invisible being (God) and that such a belief was ridiculous by pointing out that, as I study physics, I seem to believe in all sorts of things that are invisible. Worse, although I claim that God could be seen when he was incarnate in Christ, quarks (said to be some of the most fundamental "stuff" that make up matter - protons and neutrons, for instance, are made up of three quarks each) are intrinsically invisible; our current scientific understanding is that we will most likely never be able to directly observe (and probably never even separate) quarks. And yet, we believe they exist. So it must not be too ridiculous to think that invisible things exist, after all.

But Polkinghorne's book, Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, is not a response to believing in invisible things, even though he does mention the connection in the very last pages. This book is not a detailed statement on his harmonizing of science and religion, or of a deep discussion of the connections and divergences between the two: this book, as he says, is basically an outline of such theses born out of the sort of questions he gets asked when he speaks on these issues.

Before I proceed to go into my thoughts on the book, a note on who John Polkinghorne is: the man was, for a very long time, an eminent physicist and professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge, and when he decided that he had done his part in the field after many years, he became a clergyman in the Church of England. In fact, the chap is Sir John, because he got knighted in 1997, and like many eminent religious scientists, he has also received the Templeton Prize. He knows his physics - which means that he does not suffer from the same level of accusations of misusing science, as some philosophers and theologians do, sometimes baselessly, sometimes not - and he knows his theology. Which means, as various people have noted, that he is an ideal candidate to speak on these issues.

The book has eight short chapters, each dealing with some of the themes that arise in science-religion discussions. I will comment on some of them, since the others seem to present mostly "well-travelled" points of view:

1. Fact or Opinion?
2. Is There Anyone There?
3. What's Been Going On?
4. Who Are We?
5. Can a Scientist Pray?
6. What About Miracles?
7. How Will it End?
8. Can a Scientist Believe?

1. The three most compelling aspects of science is how useful it is, how effective it is in answering questions about the world we live in, and importantly, how much agreement it commands. Religion, by contrast, is said to either be universally false, or at best, a matter where opinions are higher than facts. Science is about facts, religion about opinions, and so obviously science must win. Generally, my response is that religion, somewhat like philosophy, may not give answers that command universal respect, but is nonetheless a crucial part to knowing what is true; it has more scope, asks and answers different questions, and answers them in different ways. Supposing some religious account could be true, the diversity of religious views is no testament to their universal falsity.

But interestingly, Polkinghorne takes the opposite stance, and his point is important to heed: science isn't really about facts anyway, it's about interpretations of facts. One could hardly publish a scientific paper that was just data (or "facts") - one gives discussions, organizes the data, speaks of its significance. In short, the aim of science is the theory, not the facts. Insofar as fact and theory are mixed, then, the distinction between the evidence and opinion is not quite as clear cut as some would like to believe it is. Certainly, there are reasons for the opinon, but they are indispensable. He also points out the need of opinion to judiciously consider one's data set - sometimes one must eliminate some data because it is background noise, but that can also lead to problems.

He does go on to speak about the religious side, but the terrain is quite well gone over, and I will not dawdle on all his views, just the ones that seem to bring a new perspective.

2. The second chapter gives a brief overview of his reasons for thinking that there is "Someone out there." He provides two basic arguments, one from fine-tuning, and one from the applicability of science.

I do not think fine tuning arguments are very good, for two reasons: first, they are inherently probabalistic, and yet, it seems difficult to see how one would know about what other values the fundamental constants could take on purely scientific grounds, so it's not so clear to me that we do know the unlikelihood of this universe. Second, design type explanations to these sorts of problems seem to me to override the general rule of thumb in science to prefer metaphysically economic explanations: yes, it could be that angels pull the Earth around the sun and make all the effects of gravity look like what they do, and yet it is so much simpler, or in other words, metaphysically economical, that it be the result of attraction between masses.

The applicability of science is a far more interesting argument, one which produces peer-reviewed philosophy papers in eminent journals every so often - so it is not a ridiculous argument, although I grant that Polkinghorne's presentation of it seems quite weak. What is more interesting, and is something he could have developed more, is the idea that the a priori knowledge of mathematics is so unusually applicable to the real world, which is usually only knowable a posteriori. Nonetheless, I am still uncomfortable of drawing theistic conclusions at this point.

3. This chapter deals with two underlying questions that pop up frequently, and those are "what's God up to now?" and "what about suffering?" The problem of evil is basically given a free will defence, interestingly, even extending a certain sort of freedom to the natural world, and so attempting to solve both the moral and natural evil problems. The curious thing about his "free-processes defence" is that it involves a sort of necessity clause - the fecundity of evolution requires the capacity for both positive and negative mutations, for instance, and so a free world necessarily has things like cancer. It's not clear to me that the free-processes defence works, but it's also not clear that it fails - I simply do not know the possibilities and necessities involved in the creation of the world.

His point on what God is doing now can be summed up in one, very important, line:

"God is not a God of edges, with a vested interest in beginnings. God is the God of the whole show."

By this he means that God does not simply create and then move on to more interesting things, but that creation is a continuous act of unfolding and sustaining. Evolutionary biology is not atheistic unless one understands God's place to be that of setting things in motion purely or zapping things into existence. More generally, events that look like chance and events that look necessary are, in a sense, no problem for the theist, only insofar as the theist understands God not to be just the Alpha and the Omega, but all the letters in between also. This much seems sort of obvious to me, but it is interesting how often it is neglected, even though it is foundational for Christian theology: I am being "made new in Christ", for instance, and this is not just a once of zapping thing, but an inward transformation that happens over time.

5. This was perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book. His answer is yes, obviously, and yet he does not give the response that has grown to be a sort of common cop-out: that prayer is basically a form of self-help with a spiritual dimension. His proposal is what might be considered a "classical physics" version of QDA (Quantum Divine Action) based on chaos theory. On this view, God basically works in small, non-perceptible ways, which have great influences on other events because of the butterfly effect. I don't know how powerful that makes God's action in the world, but I suppose that could work for small things, like answering prayers.

That might work, and it would certainly explain why prayers are not usually answered in such a way that precludes natural explanations. It's not a falsifiable view, but as long as God could be acting in that way, it does not rule the possibility out. What makes Polkinghorne's view in this chapter difficult is that he, because of free choices and so forth, "even God does not yet know the unformed future." It is hard to accept such a conclusion. In fact, one does not have to, since I think the concept of "middle knowledge" effectively deals with the issue of knowledge about free agents without determinism. For the record, when applied to soteriology, this view is often referred to as Molinism.

8. For Polkinghorne, the reason that science and religion can go well together is that they are looking at different questions. The essence of his harmonization project is summed up in his last paragraph's opening sentence:

"Religion is our encounter with divine reality, just as science is our encounter with physical reality."

----

Whilst I find Polkinghorne an interesting intellectual interlocutor, I must admit to preferring other Anglican clergymen's comments on science and religion, such as the less eminent as a scientist, but far more prolific as a theologian, Rev. Alister McGrath. Polkinghorne's chaos theory approach to divine action is one I would like to pursue further, and I can look with renewed excitement towards the chaos mathematics course I was going to take in 2015. His "continual creation" point is important, but it can simply be said to be biblical, and so "unoriginal." His views on science would probably be helpful for many, but I am largely convinced by scientific anti-realism (which is a view mostly rejected by scientists, I would say because scientific realism is nicer) and his only response to that view is a basic no miracles argument.

So whilst this short book was worth the read, I concur with a certain Masters student who was defending her thesis in a seminar room which I chanced to walk into: Polkinghorne answers questions very well, because he asks the easier questions.

Human Rights are Moral Illusions

I wrote previously on the question of whether human rights were to be given to humans insofar as they function as humans, or humans insofar as they actually are human (see here), in particular focusing on the issue of abortion, and I ended on that issue by noting that rights lend themselves to a hierarchical system of rights, where some take precedence over others, thereby leaving the abortion issue unresolved even if humans have the right to life merely by being human.

Illusions: things
are not as they seem.

I claim that human rights do not exist as moral realities, but that they are illusions created by other moral realities. Let me distinguish, however, between moral and legal conceptions of rights: clearly, legal rights exist, since they are existent by the mere fact that the legislation of some country, or international law, recognizes them as existent. Rights are important as legal concepts - just not, I claim, as moral or ethical concepts.

Before I continue, I must define more precisely what I mean by "human rights". I will take the first definition proposed by Jerome Shestack in the Human Rights Quarterly when he says that "Sometimes "right" is used in its strict sense of the right holder being entitled to something with a correlative duty in another."[1] This definition brings out two features that seem to me to be crucial to discussions of human rights: human rights are entitlements and they have correlative duties.

Various attacks on human rights have occurred in philosophy: Jeremy Bentham famously said that human rights were "nonsense upon stilts", Karl Marx rejected them as bourgeois inventions and illusions, and Alasdair MacIntyre argued that "there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns." MacIntyre's point was that there have not been successful arguments for the existence of human rights, and I will take him to be correct on this point.

Other groups, notably animal rights activists, object to human rights being human to the detriment of other species - that is, they object on the grounds of speciesism. Whilst these objections are important to consider for defenders of the concept of human rights, it is clear that (in the case of the animal rights activists, at least) they wish to expand the concept of rights to other creatures, such as animals, or some have suggested even that the environment has rights. Hence, they would reject human rights only insofar as they applied exclusively to humans and hence negated the idea of animal rights.

Of the bases for human rights that have been proposed, all are unconvincing: early modern philosophers, such as John Locke, appealed to faulty notions of natural law. John Stuart Mill, from the utilitarian perspective, claimed rights could be founded upon utility, and yet, appeals to utility are too fluid for any recognizable understanding of rights (such as, that they are inalienable). Legal positivist accounts (Thomas Hobbes could, perhaps, fall under this category) claim that rights come from the authority of the state - a claim I can agree with only insofar as it is said that human rights come from the authority of the state legally, which says nothing about how they arise morally without some theory to the effect of "state-makes-right." Related to these are the rights that arise from Marxist conceptions of the state, where individual rights do not exist as unalienable, and are always subject to the changing needs (or whims) of the state - until the Marxist utopian ideal is reached, that is. Rights conceptions which rely on a conception of humankind as individual and autonomous suffer the same criticism as Kantian ethics does, largely because Kant underlies many such theories (I would suggest reading Bernard Williams' masterpiece Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy for such criticisms). I cannot comment on Rawlsian arguments for human rights because I am not sufficiently familiar with his theory (other than in outline). Perhaps Rawls can succeed where others have failed.

To establish the non-existence of moral rights will take more than a paragraph about the failings of other theories to prove them, particularly because not being able to prove something does not mean it is not true. Yet belief in them does not appear to be self-evidently justified - on what basis, other than perhaps the theological one I have not discussed, can homo sapiens be said to have moral entitlements? Suppose that I can now claim that human rights do not exist qua moral rights - what follows? I have labelled human rights as moral illusions, and this they are: supposing they do not exist, we nonetheless perceive them to exist, and my question is, why? What moral reality underlies our misleading perception that human rights exist as moral entities?

I have dismissed the idea that human beings have entitlements as human beings, and here the other part of the definition given by Shestack becomes relevant - do I dismiss also that human beings have correlative duties? No. Herein lies the proposed basis for the moral illusion of human rights: because everyone has duties as human beings, moral structures with the appearance of human rights appear. The appearance of rights is rooted in the reality of duties.

For instance, take the right to life: if everybody has the duty to respect the lives of others, then it at least seems, in general cases, as if everyone has a corresponding right to life. Or the right to freedom of speech: if everyone has a duty to allow others to think freely and speak freely, the illusion of a right to freedom of speech is born. The view that human rights are the fount of duties (to grant the entitlements and respect the liberties) is actually backwards: it is duties that becomes the fount of human rights.

This view will be, I think, acceptable to various groups: the animal rights activists may have to give up their name, but now have a much more solid foundation to claim the respect for animals that they seek. Environmental activists can now speak of environmental rights as shorthand for the duties which humans have towards the environment.

There does seem to be one glaring problem with my thesis: my adoption of a utilitarian framework may lead one to think that it must be conceptually difficult to speak of duties, since duties more naturally arise in deontological accounts of ethics. This is only superficially true, as it is clear that the duty to maximise utility is inherent in utilitarian theories. I will discuss how more specific sorts of duties arise out of this general duty, and so render this account of duties-to-rights intelligible at another time.

One particular case I will address was the one left unresolved when I discussed whether human rights were to be granted by function or by nature, that of prenatal children: I argued that they had the right to life, and yet, this did not lead conclusively to the position that abortion is always wrong, only that it is generally wrong (that is, unless exceptional circumstances warrant the setting aside of the right to life). I cited Naomi Wolf as someone who appears to hold this view.

Now I have proposed that rights come from duties, and now it seems clearer that I can make a firm moral judgement: from the fact that it is always our duty to consider our own good as interchangeable with that of others (a duty that arises from broad utilitarian considerations as well as Catholic edicts such as "love your neighbour as yourself"), and if it is the case that humans are loci of incredible value, then we have a duty towards humans. Again, the considerations of by function vs. by nature that I described previously in "Intrinsic Human Rights - by function or by nature?" now kick into play, as it becomes clear that humans are valuable as humans, not as beings who function as humans. Therefore, the killing of prenatal children is morally wrong not as a breach of rights, but as a failure to comply with one's moral duties. This serves as my response to the "violinist analogy"[2] of Judith Jarvis Thomson, because on this view one does have the duty towards the violinist.

Once again I raise the issue as one I have acknowledged: where do these duties come from, particularly on my own utilitarian framework? I will turn to this issue, one I claim to be easily dealt with, on another occasion.

---

[1] Shestack, J., “The Philosophic Foundations of Human Rights”, Human Rights Quarterly 20 (1998) 201-234

[2] Thomson, J.J., “A Defence of Abortion”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1 (1971): 47-66

----------------------------------

Notes:

1. It is clear that I must square all of what I have been saying in light of my theological understanding of humanity. For instance, is it not the case that the right to life is something inherent in all humans by virtue of their being bearers of the Imago Dei? I have set aside theological considerations, and, as with the note above, I will address the issue of understanding how these two (or three) points of view match up in another piece. 

2. What about natural law bases for human rights? I recognize that it has been the natural law which has historically given rise to the language of rights. I will address these concerns later on. This is a very important area however, because not only is natural law intrinsically secular (and so it can be easily brought into the public sphere), but since rights have their genesis historically in natural law theories, human rights as concepts are unlikely to be properly understood outside their context.

3. Since I have been reading a lot of academic papers recently, I feel the need to apologize for not researching for this blog-post. Although it may sound snobbish to say so, I do have a decent background in the idea of human rights, and so I have relied upon that to get a feeling for how the field stands today. I make no firm assertion that what I say is original or not rejected for some good reasons that are unknown to me.

Intrinsic Human Rights – by function or by nature?

Pervading a lot of popular level discussions of morality and social justice there is talk of “human rights”, often modified by adjectives such as “innate”, “intrinsic”, “inherent” or “unalienable.” The idea seems to be that, by virtue of being human, we are entitled to various things – for instance, education, free speech, life, private property, etc. When the issue comes to the right to life of the unborn, however, a different tactic seems to be taken quite frequently.

 

One move is to de-humanize the unborn child – “it is a clump of cells” – and hence to make out that it is not a human child. This tactic seems to be largely an emotional appeal, because all humans are clumps of cells. Certainly, adult humans are very complicated clumps of cells, but unless one wishes to invoke the idea of an immaterial soul (an idea which would complicate the issue even more), then the distinction between an unborn child and a newborn child must be made on grounds other than material constituency.

More sophisticated versions of the “clump of cells” argument turn on the much more real distinction between the clump of cells which is an adult human, and the clump of cells which is an embryo. Here, the right to life of the prenatal child is objected to on the grounds that the child is not functionally a human being.

Our intuition about who has a right to life, even for those who think that prenatal children are excluded from the category, is veritably pushed to difficult limits by assigning human rights (and consequently, the right to life) to only those who are functionally human. The difficulty is this: whatever attributes are said to be the ones that define a functional human, there can be found some post-natal human that lacks it and who we would still want to consider "fully human".

For some, particularly the consistent consequentialists, this is not a problem. Some people argue that yes, human rights must be given to people who are functionally human, and then go on to propose criteria for such a state: perhaps capacity for abstract thinking, or some loosely defined form of self-awareness. For pro-abortion activists, such definitions may seem appealing, and yet, they tend to leave the line in an unacceptable place - abstract thinking comes years after birth, and when self-awareness comes depends on the definition, but it is clear that such a definition would not discriminate between the mere location of the child (ie, inside or outside the mother's womb).

It seems clear that functional definitions of humanity will point to attributes that are not necessarily developed until definitively post-natal infancy, leaving as legitimate killing the immediately post-natal child, that is to say, infanticide. Still, such a view does not end at that side of life - it calls into question many elderly people, who by the end of their lives also lack various attributes common to adult humans. Put bluntly, there are elderly people who could very easily be denied their functional humanity, and so lose the right to live; perhaps it would be thought of as legitimate, even if sad, to kill our society's elderly. Maybe arguments could be made about the resources they would take up if they were not killed, or their diminished quality of life made grounds for their death.

Without attempting to be overly-precise, I suggest that human rights can either be had on the basis of the human nature of a being or the human function of  being, that is to say, based on what the being is or what the being does/can do. Since most people are not willing to strip elderly people or newborn children of their human right to life, it must follow that most people are compelled to grant the right to life on the basis of nature, that is, on the basis of the humanity of the subject.

This has important ramifications for the abortion debate, because if this is the case, then prenatal humans have human rights. This does not, in fact, settle the issue of abortion outright, because the language of rights is too malleable - for instance, some argue that one can have rights to do wrong, or that there is a hierarchy of rights such that, in some cases (war is suggested example), rights that seem fundamental (like the right to life) can be rejected for the sake of some other right. In short, the very concept of a right does not lead logically to its unalienable character, at least not without some more argumentation. This hierarchical view of rights seems to be the one given by a leading feminist in the third wave feminist movement, Naomi Wolf:

"War is legal: it is sometimes even necessary. Letting the dying die in peace is often legal and sometimes even necessary. Abortion should be legal; it is sometimes even necessary. Sometimes the mother must be able to decide that the fetus, in its full humanity, must die. But it is never right or necessary to minimize the value of the lives involved or the sacrifice incurred in letting them go. Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement and responsibility can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position and consolidate the support of the center." ("Our Bodies, Our Souls", October 16th, 1995, The New Republic)

Various people have rebutted Wolf by asserting the more fundamental nature of the right to life - it is, after all, a requirement of most other rights, since almost any other conceivable right assumes that the person is alive. That line of thought may be fruitful, and yet, I wish to suggest an alternative: that rights are misleading and incorrect concepts in the realm of ethics, that they should be relegated to the realms of legal and political philosophy and that instead, ethics should use another conceptual framework which sheds more light on these issues. Whilst what I have proposed in terms of rights seems to still be valid under the current legal framework, the new framework which I will propose will give the ethical dimension more clarity. 

Christian Vegetarianism? A Reflection and Review of "For Love of Animals" by Charles Camosy

Book finished on January 2nd, 2014. Disclaimer: I ignore some parts of Camosy's treatment of the issue in this piece, and expand on it with my own thoughts - please read the book to understand what Camosy writes on the topic.

I heard about the argument of this book a from a brief news article that I read in late October, 2013. I thought to myself, "hey, there might be something in this", added the book to my rather long booklist, and I suspected I would get round to it within the next few years. Something tickled my curiosity, though: did a consistent ethic of life really include animal life? Surely by "life" one meant "human life", after all, even bacteria are alive, and nobody argues for duties towards bacteria (unless they benefit whoever has them).

Near the end of November, a friend who had it messaged me telling me that the book was great, "very challenging, definitely going full on veggie now. Will bring it next time I see you." This chap certainly seemed to have been changed in a quite meaningful way by the message of the book, and even though people seem to be convinced by all sorts of oddities, I doubted he would be altered by any old nonsense - so, given that he was going to lend it to me, I thought I would bump it up my list. It could hardly hurt to explore the idea of vegetarianism inspired by Christianity.

At only about 150 pages, it only took a few hours to read - some late at night (or the morning of the 2nd) and the rest after I got up from bed. It seems to be one of those books which are easy enough to read, but one has to think about whether or not the thesis is as sensible as one was lead to believe as one read. At its core, I think For Love of Animals is, whether fortunately or unfortunately, quite compelling, even if I disagree on some points.

The book could be divided into two parts, the first being a look at Christian views on non-human animals in the past, in the tradition, and the second half looking at now, today, and what we should do about the current situation.

To begin a book about a moral relationship with other animals, however, Camosy has to step back a bit and ask: what, as a Christian, constitutes an ethical treatment of anyone, be it dog, a woman, a black person, or even oneself? So he starts with something which is central to Christianity, and it is justice. He notes flat out, "perhaps one reason why questions of justice are often so difficult to discuss - and provoke such strong reactions - is that a genuine concern for justice means that we might risk rethinking our familiar and comfortable ways of seeing the world." (p. 3) Uh oh. That sort of sentence always seems to preface arguments with conclusions that would be highly inconvenient if true - think of the slave traders or owners being confronted with anti-slavery arguments. It's not enough to appeal to one's legal rights, or the majority concensus - it is the heart of rationality that sound arguments have true conclusions, and true conclusions must be followed. Whether it be the misguided language of slavery "rights" or abortion "rights", justice makes demands on our liberty and autonomy which are very often inconvenient.

Whilst I think the last sentence as an add-on is a bit awkwardly phrased as a definition, and I would prefer justice to be couched in terms of duties and not rights (or being "owed" something), this definition does seem to be the correct product of a Christian deliberation on the justice made manifest in Jesus Christ: "Christian justice means consistently and actively working to see that individuals and groups - especially vulnerable population on the margin - are given what they are owed. It will be especially skeptical of practices which promote violence, consumerism and autonomy." (p. 7)

And so he turns to animals: what does justice towards animals entail?

He knows that justice for animals sounds like a strange concept to most, and probably associated with anti-Christian animal rights activists. But, he says, we already have a basic intuition for the duty of kindness towards animals, for instance, when we hear of horrendous abuse of pets (just google images for "animal abuse" if you have never heard of such cases) or other animals, we intuitively respond with compassion, with moral outrage.

Still, he knows he has to dedicate a chapter to defending the idea that non-human animals even make it to moral status. He goes through the Christian tradition briefly and notes all the sorts of creatures who have moral status, yet are not human - angels, for instance, and that mysterious reference to nephilim might refer to non-human animals with moral agency. Moreover, people are beginning to consider the hypothetical of aliens - a little bit crazy at the moment, but not outside the imaginable - and they may too have moral agency. The point is not so much a defence of the existence of these beings, but that it is still conceivable that non-human animals be accorded with moral status.

Sure, so we do not exploit angels or aliens or whatnot. But animals? They were given to us to eat, right? Well, yes and no. The Edenic state appears to be quite pointedly a vegetarian (probably even vegan) one, and it is not until after the Fall that eating animals is acceptable. Is this total permission, or accomodating permission - by which I mean, is it like the permission to eat from any tree in the garden (except one), or is it like the permission to own slaves? It is unclear, and although Camosy spends a little more time on it, I think his argument will ultimately be unaffected by the distinction.

He makes an important point about creation, though, which is worth pausing for a moment to consider: whilst we frequently think otherwise, creation is not about or for us. All of creation, including animals, are said to be good entirely independent of humankind. We are to have dominion over it, be caretakers of it, subdue it and make it fruitful - that is to say, with all these activities we are to partake in the creative nature of God. I will write elsewhere about the clear Temple and Covenant motifs which appear and re-appear in discussions of creation (Genesis and elsewhere), but the basic point is a rather obvious one, that just because we live on God's green earth, does not mean we have absolute property rights. We are stewards entrusted with creation. We have broken this covenant of care, and so Christ has had to redeem not only us, but the whole of creation, which now "waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." (Romans 8) And that was before the industrial revolution!

This is a part of the Catechism which is likely to be expanded in the years to come with new encyclicals and the exercise of the ordinary Magisterium as it addresses the destruction humanity unleashes on the world, not least to do with our effects on the climate, on natural treasures and the conservation of natural habitats - but nonetheless, the Church is not silent on care for creation. The relevant section is CCC 2415-2418 (bold mine): "The seventh commandment enjoins respect for the integrity of creation. Animals, like plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity. Use of the mineral, vegetable, and animal resources of the universe cannot be divorced from respect for moral imperatives. Man's dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute; it is limited by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor, including generations to come; it requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation.

Animals are God's creatures. He surrounds them with his providential care. By their mere existence they bless him and give him glory. Thus men owe them kindness. We should recall the gentleness with which saints like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Philip Neri treated animals.

God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure. Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives.

It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons."

I have largely skipped over Camosy's discussion of the Christian tradition's engagement with non-human animals, as well as statements from recent Popes, holy people and saints, and entirely omitted almost all discussion of the Sacred Scriptures. These are relevant, and raise some potentially thorny questions, to which proper response must be given in due time. For now, the Catechism's summary of care for creation should be sufficient for Catholics. I want to turn, then, to the practical application of these ideas; of Christian justice, stewardship of creation, and the teaching of the Catechism. Camosy's conclusion is probably slightly stronger than the one I am going to give here, but the weaker version will suffice:

It is quite clear that the Catechism permits eating animals. I need not argue that this is merely a circumstancial liberty (like owning slaves) that will be erradicated later on. I wish to point out instead that the Catechism moderates the claim by pointing out that it is nonetheless wrong ("contrary to human dignity" - that is, a violation of our intrinsic ideal and purpose) to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. One must ask, given the quite deplorable conditions from which a substantial portion of our meat comes - not all, and in Australia we are a bit luckier - does spending money to fuel the factory farming industry constitute a real need? I cannot see any justification for it. Note that this is not a conclusion that rejects eating meat outright - it objects to excessive meat consumption (which would constitute needless death) and particularly to the way in which animals are caused to suffer in order to maximise profits for the farm in question. Just because I am well known for advocating that standard logical form be used more often in these discussions, the argument could be expressed:

1. If it is unnecessary to cause an animal to suffer and/or die, then causing it to suffer and/or is morally wrong.

2. The meat that is eaten comes predominantly from animals that have suffered needlessly (in particular, from factory farms).

3. Needless buying and consumption of that meat is cooperation with, and subsidy of, the moral wrong of premise 1.

4. Therefore, needless buying and consuming of that meat is wrong.

The conclusion is not as universal as "meat eating is wrong." It is far more measured: supposing that eating the meat does not constitute a need (which, for most of us, it does not), and supposing the animal did suffer and die needlessly (highly likely, but not guaranteed), then such meat eating is morally wrong.

Not eating meat is hard, and no matter how many reasons are given (sustainability, an eschatological observation, personal health, environmental, et cetera), the social structures that exist in the world, in our families and in our wider communities do not favour vegetarianism. Particularly for men: vegetarianism is seen as effeminate and hence negative, a violation of our proper steak loving manliness. Traditional family meals all tend to have meat - Christmas meals, for instance. The argument I have given, however, demands either our assent or the rejection of its soundness - although I note again, not all meat eating is made bad by that particular argument. If one can get an animal that did not suffer needlessly, and that did not die needlessly, then as far as this argument is concerned, eat away! Perhaps that means a rather large cost - but that is fine, succumbing to cheap meat qua cheap meat would be formal cooperation with injustice, it would be failing to pay our debt of kindness to animals, and hence, wrong. Camosy would probably want to go further than that, but at present, I am only comfortable assenting this far.

The issue at hand, to conclude, is one of justice. Christians of all people should lead firmly by example into new depths of justice, kindness, and care for what God has entrusted to us.

Why I am a Utilitarian and a Catholic

For a blogpost titled for what I am, it might be odd to start with what I am not. I am not an ethicist. The only reason I know anything about ethics is that ethics deals with how one ought to act, and I, like everyone else, have to act in some way or another. I would like to think that I have as much ethical expertise as business professionals have mathematical expertise: not that much, but enough to do their jobs. Some sort of ethical knowledge is necessary for humans, which are generally moral agents, and therefore I must be acquainted with ethical precepts to do “my job.” But I am not an ethicist.

I have often said that utilitarianism is the only potential candidate for a secular theory of ethics, a position I have held for many years, even when I was an atheist, even when I was willing to act in

Henry Sidgwick, often held
to be the greatest utilitarian.

accordance with my utilitarian values. Utilitarianism is, I think, the first and only truly empiricist theory of ethics, and I would defend it thus: I perceive self-evidently that pleasure is better than pain, indeed, that pleasure is good (hence pleasurable) and pain is bad. I infer that pleasure is better than pain for all sentient beings. I draw the conclusion, then, that what is right is that there be more pleasure and less pain, and finally, that an action is right when it maximises pleasure and minimises pain.

This reasoning solves what I will refer to as the “value problem” (how to jump from a set of empirical data to a value) by empiricist means: I know pleasure is valuable because I experience pleasure as good. It has a positive phenomenal quality. I should note that pleasure is being used in a pseudo-technical sense, because I do not necessarily mean simple pleasures (like eating a good piece of chocolate) but holistic pleasure (which might include reading a good book, or beating a personal best in the pool, or discovering some new fact about the universe). The reverse is true for justifying that pain is bad. This seems to be a solution to the value problem, and if one supposes that other beings are also capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, then I think an objective moral duty follows: ceteris paribus, one must increase pleasure and decrease pain.¹

When I became a Christian, and more importantly, when I became (of all stripes of Christian) a Catholic, I had to re-evaluate my position. Nonetheless, the argument that I have proposed for utilitarianism does not become unsound (supposing it was sound in the first place) simply because of the large set of other justified beliefs I now had.² None of these other beliefs negate the truth of the empirical premise (that pleasure has positive phenomenal qualities, and pain has bad) or the assumption that other sentient creatures are capable of experiencing pain and pleasure. Still, the Church believes in moral rights and wrongs that do not make sense on a utilitarian framework – in most of those cases, the Church is closer to our natural moral intuitions than utilitarian theory is. How was I to make sense of this?

Since I am not an ethicist, and because utilitarian theory and Christian ethics accord on plenty of points, it took me a while to even bother to try and solve this problem. I told everyone that I was a virtue ethicist, although I half meant that I held to the virtue of maximising the good, which is a very utilitarian way of thinking about virtue ethics.

The solution I propose to harmonise both positions seems to me to be remarkably simple, and maybe somebody came up with it before me, even though I did not take it consciously from anywhere else. Because I study mathematics, and because utilitarianism lends itself naturally to discussions of moral calculus, this solution might sound overly mathematical and complicated, but the principle is very simple: experience shows that pleasure is an intrinsic good. What being a Catholic adds is consideration of other intrinsic goods. Being Catholic does not so much negate the previous solution to the value problem that utilitarianism offers, it expands it, and in many cases, it may well overshadow the value given to pleasure.

Take the almost canonical example to illustrate the non-intuitive aspects of utilitarianism, the fat man on the bridge who could be pushed over to stop a train and save the lives of a group of five people working on the train rail tracks: utilitarian theory says that pushing over this “innocent” bystander is the morally obligatory act – not only justifiable, but morally obligatory. It is a simple calculation, ignoring for a moment variables such as capacity of happiness of each person: killing one saves five. Easy as that. I would have nodded my head at this morally non-intuitive result, all the more happy to be accepting the logical conclusion of an argument without reference to how I feel about it.

The difference being a Catholic changes is not to devalue pleasure (or utility, or happiness, etc.) but to value human life. Perhaps it might be objected “but that was the problem, one life for the sake of five”, except that sort of calculation only works for finite values on human life. Suppose human life were to be valued infinitely. Then the moral calculus makes no sense, the set of allowable transfinite calculations does not include operations like subtraction to yield a useful quantity for moral calculus.³

Were this a proper article, I would be obliged to discuss and work out how theoretical calculations could be computed in light of these difficulties. However, my purpose is more conservative: to explain both my utilitarianism, duly modified to incorporate newly found truths, with an ethical system that seems opposed to it. Unless unassailable difficulties arise which I cannot foresee, I will remain comfortable in this position as an orthodox Catholic who accepts the basic utilitarian argument.

1 I am aware that pleasure and pain are related, but not mere opposites, and so the moral calculus may need some more thought and refinement, that is, decreasing pain and increasing pleasure may, in some rare cases, pull in different directions, and in such cases the principle is inconclusive. I am also aware that situations where some pain leads to greater pleasure are not entirely clear on this basic principle. Ask me, if you want to know about my solutions to these problems.

2 One thing that did change is that, as beings who will have an eternal future, the moral calculation would have to include the afterlife. But that is readily understood in terms of utilitarian theory, and it still leaves (indeed, probably exasperates) the question of why some things were wrong in an of themselves.

3 If I were talking about a ratio, then I might be able to do the calculation, using l'Hôpital's rule, which some high school students and all first year mathematicians learn about. But that would complicate the otherwise simple point.