NO LAUGHING MATTER.(discusses Professor James R. Flynn's criticism of "How to Defend Humane Ideals")(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)

PROFESSOR JAMES R. FLYNN, in defending himself (Quadrant, June 2001) against my first and most basic criticism of his book How to Defend Humane Ideals, presents my argument as follows: "... without something like this ["moral properties"], our moral principles have no objectivity. Therefore, we cannot say to those who are anti-humane or to those who reject morality that they ought to be humane. We can only point to our humane ideals and say `here I stand'."

Very roughly, and much condensed, this comes down to the conditional proposition, "If there are no moral properties then there is no morality" where it is the conditionality that needs emphasis. If this is grasped then Flynn's response comes out as irrelevant. To write, as he does, "you cannot blackmail something into being true" is to state something itself true but does not touch what is the central difficulty for the thesis of his book, which is that whether or not moral facts obtain (non-illusory) moral life is possible.

And because of his concentration on the issue of the existence of moral properties, and his keenness to uproot arguments in their favour, he is blind to the obvious implication of an analogy he draws between the belief "that our thinking, behaviour, and very language assume a moral reality" and the belief in God. Just as those of us who have become atheists "have purged our minds and language of both God and God-talk" so those who have clearly seen through moral realism "must do the same about our belief in moral objectivity". But then I take it that those who have lost their faith in such a thoroughly thought-out way would no longer claim to live a religious life, that such a claim would make no sense. Rationally to pray to, to worship God, presupposes the belief in God's existence and even if the hardy atheist of Flynn's description attended church and played a part in its rituals this would not be for religious--as distinct from, say, aesthetic or political--reasons. Why then is the moral life supposed so different that it still breathes vigorously even though far removed from the invigorating atmosphere which previously sustained it?

Now if it is held both that there are no objective moral situations, which good men and women could bring about and sustain, and that nevertheless one can with passably good sense still speak of the moral life, then we might suspect that the moral content, necessary for such propositions even to appear sensible, must (perhaps unconsciously) be being diverted from "the world" to somewhere else. More especially we might expect that content somehow to be reattached to the mode of "bringing about" rather than what is brought about, that is, to "moral rules". And, in fact, Flynn, ...