The Uncaring Impartial Spectator: A Theistic Response to Austin Dacey's Naturalistic Consequentialist Ethics

This is a paper I wrote back in 2008.

THE UNCARING IMPARTIAL SPECTATOR: A THEISTIC RESPONSE TO AUSTIN DACEY’S NATURALISTIC CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS

In his recently published book, The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life, Austin Dacey attempts to lay out a successful naturalistic account of ethics.  One of the major objections to naturalism from a theistic perspective is that it destroys the foundations of ethics.  Theists often assert that a naturalistic system cannot account for the reality of ethics.  Naturalists have responded to this charge in different ways.  Some have acknowledged the validity of the charge and have rejected the concept of ethics (at least in an objective sense). [ed. See a good example of this here.]  Others have attempted to ground ethics in an egoistic system, like that of the famous Roman orator Cicero. [ed. Others have attempted to produce an individual-desire-based ethical system that avoids a crass kind of egoism.  For example, see here.]

Dr. Dacey has taken a different approach.  He has attempted to present a case for a non-egoistic, objective system of ethics.  And he has attempted to show that such a system can be constructed within the confines of a naturalistic metaphysics, without reference to a theistic God.  I agree with much of Dacey’s approach, but I think his attempt ultimately falls flat because of his assumption of naturalism.  Naturalism lacks a certain vital ingredient necessary to make his method successful at establishing objective ethics.  That ingredient can only be found in a classical theistic metaphysics.  My intent in this article is to explore Dacey’s method, show where he goes right, show how naturalism causes his attempt to fail, and show how theism would cause it to succeed.

An Account of Objective Ethics

Dacey’s approach to ethics is basically a form of “consequentialism,” also known as “utilitarianism.”  This approach recognizes that ethics is ultimately about “the good,” or “values.”  This is evident in our normal use of language.  The concept of “ought,” as in “I ought to do such-and-such,” implies a goal, an ideal that someone is attempting to reach or attain.  “I ought to take out the trash.”  Why?  “Because if I don’t, my mother will kill me!”  Or another example:  “I ought to set aside some of my income to help the poor.”  Why?  “Because they are suffering and need food.”  In both these cases, and in any other example that could be thought of, there is a goal in mind that creates the “ought.”  In the first example, it is the goal of not being punished; in the second, it is the goal of alleviating the suffering of other people.  The bottom line here is that “oughts” are always related to goals, and goals are things that are desired.  To desire something is to place a bit of one’s happiness in the attaining of that thing.  It is to say, “Attaining this thing will complete or increase my happiness.”  Consequentialism therefore recognizes that happiness is really the only goal.  But we have to be careful of our language here.  Someone might say, “Happiness is not my only goal; I desire many other things as well, such as comfort, money, good friends, etc.”  The problem with this, of course, is that happiness is not some particular object that one might desire instead of, say, roast chicken.  Happiness is simply the state of being satisfied.  To say I am seeking happiness is simply to say that I am seeking something, but it doesn’t tell me what I am seeking.  I do not find happiness in the abstract; I find it in particular objects or states of affairs.  Therefore “seeking happiness” means the same thing as “pursuing some goal or desire, whatever it may be.”  Therefore, seeking any goal, any good, any valuable thing at all is a subset of “seeking happiness.”  When we understand this, we can see that since ethics is a matter of “ought” and “values,” it is therefore always connected to the seeking of happiness.    Consequentialism is basically the idea that ethics consists in seeking the greatest happiness of the greatest number of beings.1

A consequentialist approach allows us to find an objectively real, empirically verifiable foundation for basic ethical concepts like “good,” “bad,” “value,” “right,” “wrong,” etc.  Happiness and suffering, with all their variants, are objectively real things, and anyone who is human is confronted constantly with empirical manifestations of these states in his/her own experiences.  Therefore we have something real on which to begin to ground objective ethics.  Dacey puts it this way:

    Now it makes sense to think of values as real and objective even while they are not supernatural or transcendent, part of some eternal symphony.  A value is always a value to someone--it contributes to the well-being of some person or sentient creature.  Take away all the beings to whom anything can matter, and nothing matters.  But so long as we live here, in this world, values live with us, and they don’t disappear when no one is looking at them.  They are relational--they exist in relation to us--but they exist objectively.  In the same way, color and sounds exist in relation to our eyes and ears, but they don’t change depending on what we think about them.  Our good helps to explain our desires, decisions, aspirations, confusions, and regrets.  And that makes it as real as anything.2

Since happiness is something objective, Dacey points out that there is a distinction between what a person may want and what will actually make him/her happy.  Borrowing from philosopher Peter Railton, Dacey illustrates this point with the story of an imaginary tourist named Lonnie:

    Imagine a tourist names Lonnie who has fallen ill while traveling in a foreign country.  Lonnie is feeling miserable, and in thinking about what would settle his stomach, he finds himself craving a comforting glass of milk.  Lonnie desires milk.  However, one can ask whether it is desirable for him; that is, whether it would be good for him, whether it would make his life go better.  In fact, Lonnie is suffering from dehydration, something common to on-the-go tourists but difficult for them to self-diagnose.  Milk, difficult to digest as it is, would only make Lonnie’s condition worse, whereas a long drink of water would quickly improve it.  Now, if Lonnie were in possession of all the relevant information about his situation, he would see this.  The fully informed Lonnie--call him Lonnie-Plus--would realize that what Lonnie needs is water, not milk.  If Lonnie-Plus were not only fully informed but also rational, he would use this information to further his underlying goal of feeling better.  So, if Lonnie-Plus were advising Lonnie, he would want Lonnie to drink water rather than milk.  What is good for Lonnie--what satisfies a real interest of Lonnie--is what Lonnie-Plus would want Lonnie to want.3

Dacey points out here what is a very obvious fact upon reflection.  My conscious wants (or even unconscious wants) are not necessarily the same as the objective fact about what is really good for me, what will really make me happy or satisfy me.

But we do not yet have an account of objective ethics.  As far as we have come so far, we have only prudence and a form of egoism.  “Prudence” is the attitude of seeking wisely one’s own happiness.  Assuming that I want to be happy, the fact that my wants are not always the same as what will objectively make me happy is useful to me.  It helps me to be more accurate and objective in the search for my own happiness.  But Dacey rightly points out that prudence is not ethics.  The principles involved in prudence may be crucial components of ethics, but there is more to ethics than prudence.  Ethics is about “oughts”--What ought I to do?  How ought I to live?  Prudence gives us no oughts; at least it gives us no oughts in an ultimate sense.  Prudence only provides oughts within a limited sphere, a sphere which ultimately has no normative value.  For example, prudence can lead me to say that “I ought to go to the grocery store, because otherwise I shall have no food to eat.”  I can go on to ask, Why should I care if I have food to eat?  “Because I will starve if I don’t eat.”  Why should I care about that?  “Because I don’t want to starve.”  In other words, because I have placed my happiness at least partly in the ideal of not starving.  But why should I care about my happiness?  “Because I just do.”  There can be no other answer.  Prudence cannot tell me why I should or ought to care about my happiness--it simply assumes as a practical matter that I do.  Therefore the normative should or ought ultimately gives way to a merely descriptive do that has no normative content at all.  The oughts of mere prudence are like the rules of a football game.  The rules tell me what I ought to do in order to play the game right and in order to win, but these oughts are based on the purely descriptive, non-normative assumption that I in fact wish to play football.  They don’t tell me why I ought to play football.  However practically valid the oughts of prudence (or of football) are, they ultimately provide no normative content; and it is that normative content that is crucial to ethics.  It is that normative content that takes us out of simply asking what we want to do and instead gets us asking what we ought to do in an objective sense whether we want to or not. As Dacey puts it,

    A theory of objective well-being like the one sketched above gets us closer to the moral point of view, but not quite there.  The A-Plus [or Lonnie-Plus] point of view transcends your present point of view, but it is still a view of your good.  The next move in the direction of the moral point of view is to transcend your own good, to rise to a scale from which you can survey your good and the good of others with equal, impartial concern.4

As the above quote indicates, Dacey believes that the next step in developing a system of objective ethics is to rise above a simple egoistic prudential viewpoint and to seek an objective, impartial viewpoint.  This is a huge shift, because I am now no longer looking at things from my own partial perspective--what is valuable to me--but I am attempting to gain an objective, universal perspective.  What we need here is a reminder of reality.  I am only one person, and I am not the only person in existence.  There are lots of other people (not to mention other sentient beings) in the universe who are just as capable of happiness and suffering as I am.  To limit real value only to what is valuable to me is to confuse my partial perspective with the way things really are.  We need a viewpoint adjustment.  We need to see things as they really are and not just as they appear to our partial, biased perspective.  Dacey here is following the reasoning of the philosopher Adam Smith, who pointed out that “just as objects closer to our eyes appear larger than they are in reality, interests nearer to our own appear more important than they are, from the moral point of view.”5  Adam Smith realized the importance of this fact for ethics:

In the same manner, to the selfish and original passions of human nature, the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own, appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sorrow, a much more ardent desire or aversion, than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connexion.  His interest, as long as they are surveyed from this station, can never be put into the balance with our own, can never restrain us from doing whatever may tend to promote our own, how ruinous soever to him.  Before we can make any proper comparison of those opposite interests, we must change our position.  We must view them, neither from our own place nor yet from him, neither with our own eyes nor yet with his, but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connexion with either, and who judges with impartiality between us.6

Dacey summarizes Smith’s point:

This point of view--neither our own nor our neighbor’s--is what we call the moral point of view.  It belongs to the “impartial spectator,” and the voice of the impartial spectator is the voice of conscience. . . .
    The impartial spectator sees what we often lose sight of: that if our interests matter, then so do the interests of our neighbors.  What we ought to do is what we ought to do all things considered, and that means having considered their interests as well as our own.  Think about why it is so difficult for an honest, thinking person to be an egoist, someone who holds that his interests alone determine what he ought to do.  Try to put yourself in the mind-set of the egoist: You believe that your interests matter, in the sense that they provide strong reasons for action (for example, your interest in not starving provides a strong reason why you should get your next meal).  If your interests matter, what about the interests of your neighbors and fellow human beings?  Is there something special about you that your interests should be taken into consideration while theirs should not?  True, you are you and they are they.  But why should that make a difference?  Like you, they think their interests matter, too.  So if anyone’s interests matter, everyone’s interests matter.7

Dacey (along with Adam Smith) is clearly right here.  If I am to attain a system of objective ethics and transcend the purely prudential considerations of my own desires, I must have an objective view of reality.  And the fact is that I am no more important than anyone else from an objective perspective.  At least there is no reason to see why I would be.  My happiness and suffering are no more important than the happiness and suffering of every other person.  They may be more important to me, but from the universe’s perspective, we are all equal.  The moral point of view is the perspective of the universe, of objective reality as a whole, not the perspective of any one being in the universe, and it is the moral point of view which provides the foundation for objective ethics.

Where the Naturalistic View Fails

It is at this point that Dacey’s naturalistic worldview is going to begin to cause him problems.  The naturalistic worldview posits an ultimately impersonal universe.  This is in contrast to a theistic worldview, which posits a fundamentally personal universe.  In other words, theism starts out with a personal being--God--in whom all things consist and from whom all is derived.  Naturalism, on the other hand, starts out with impersonal matter, energy, and physical laws, of which all things consist and from which all is derived.  In theism, ultimate reality is a personal being.  In naturalism, ultimate reality is an impersonal system which produces persons (at least once) accidentally, without deliberate intention, just as it does everything else without deliberate intention, being impersonal and therefore mindless.

The impersonal character of the naturalistic universe has a crucial bearing on Dacey’s system.  Since the universe, or ultimate objective reality, is impersonal, it has no goals, ideals, values, or desires.  Therefore when we take that crucial step out of our own perspective (and everyone else’s) and adopt an objective, universal, impartial perspective, we enter into a perspective in which nothing matters at all.  In naturalism, things matter to me and they matter to you, but nothing matters to the universe.  Nothing matters objectively.  Objectively, there are no ideals, no good or bad, and no values.  Nothing is valuable at all to any degree, because as Dacey points out, “A value is always a value to someone.”  Value is inherently personal, not impersonal.  If we adopt an impartial, objective perspective in a naturalistic worldview, we will not be motivated to care about others in addition to ourselves; rather, we will care about nothing at all including ourselves and everyone else.  In naturalism, values cannot transcend particular evolved beings.  Therefore, when I attempt to leave my own perspective and adopt a position from outside my own interests, I automatically leave all value and therefore all oughts behind me.

Upon reaching the impartial point of view (which Dacey acknowledges to be the moral point of view) and finding that nothing matters and therefore there is no such thing as real ethics, I can then go two different ways.  I can keep up an objective viewpoint and stop caring about anything at all, or I can allow myself to fall back into my old biased, prudential viewpoint.  Either way is fine from the universe’s perspective.  There is no reason for me to try to keep an objective perspective.  Since nothing ultimately matters and yet I still find myself alive and possessing desires and a capacity for happiness and suffering which I cannot wholly escape, I might as well go back to the A-Plus view of things and attempt to maximize my own happiness.  That happiness will probably involve trying to promote the happiness of (some) others to some degree, since it is part of human nature to need some people and to care about them.  But I will recognize that they really have no value any more than I do, and their parochial practical value is based solely in their ability to help satisfy my desires.  It is likely that pursuing my own selfish interests will sometimes involve causing suffering to others as well, as Adam Smith noted, but this is of no consequence from an objective point of view.  Of course, I might find that I am not up to putting up the effort to find out even as much as I can about the A-Plus point of view.  I have no moral obligation to care about my own happiness any more than anyone else’s, so if I am content, why waste the effort?  If I cease to be content, I can change in the future; and if I can’t--well, there is always suicide.  I will die anyway someday, and death ends all suffering.  As Cicero said, I can walk out of life whenever I want just as I can walk out of a theater when the show no longer pleases me.

How Theism Succeeds

Naturalism therefore destroys all hopes of arriving at a system of objective or real ethics--that is, ethics that are distinct from prudence.  However, the missing component that dooms naturalism is present in theism.  In a theistic worldview, ultimate reality is a personal being.  Persons are not mere accidents of impersonal laws and chemistry but are a fundamental part of what the universe is all about.  We are not by-products of a mindless universe but have been designed to exist by a universal mind.  This changes the picture entirely.  Now when we take the crucial step of leaving our own perspective and adopting an impartial, universal, objective perspective, we find that this perspective is the perspective of an absolute person who has ideals, values, goals, and desires, to whom things matter.  Now things matter to the universe, to objective reality, and therefore there is an objective foundation for a real moral point of view.

We can think of God as the author of the universe.  In the naturalistic worldview, the universe and its history is like a novel written by no one for no purpose.  In this case, there really is no goal to the story, and characters and actions cannot be good or bad.  Things just happen, and none of it matters.  But if the novel has an author, the universe of the novel has a purpose and a goal.  The author’s values provide an objective viewpoint from which to derive objective values.  In my novel, my perspective as the author is by definition the way things really are.  If I see something as bad, it is bad.  If I see something as good, it is good.  If I see something as valuable, it is inherently valuable.  Moral evaluations are not just subjective desires of the characters in the novel, but they are objective, impartial facts built into the very fabric of reality.  So it is with the real universe in theism.  God’s viewpoint is the objective viewpoint, and therefore what matters to him really matters objectively.  This is the only possible way to ground a system of objective ethics.  Without God, such a thing is not possible.  Dacey’s method of going about to establish objective ethics is right, but he lacks the crucial ingredient of an absolute person who constitutes ultimate, objective reality.  We can sum up this conclusion with a nice, pithy phrase:  If it matters to the ultimate, it ultimately matters.  If it doesn’t matter to the ultimate, it doesn’t ultimately matter.

Responses to a Few Objections to Theistic Ethics

Before I conclude, I would like to respond to a couple of possible objections to the theistic solution to Dacey’s problem.  One objection might be that positing God as the foundation of ethics is arbitrary.  If the reason that human beings are objectively valuable is because God values them, couldn’t he stop valuing them tomorrow?  This objection overlooks the fact that in classical theism, God is an unchanging, timeless entity.  His viewpoint will never change, although it takes into account all the various circumstances people are in when they make decisions in this world.  Also, in theism God is not simply one more being floating about the universe; he is the very rock bottom foundation of reality.  Nothing could be conceived to be less arbitrary than grounding ethics in an unchanging being who constitutes the very foundation of reality.

A related objection might be that while God might be unchangeable, yet if ethics is based on his values doesn’t that imply that it is based on his whim, and therefore is it not still arbitrary?  The problem with this objection is that it assumes that God could have no reason for the values he has.  Of course, if his values are the source of ethics, he cannot look to any higher ethical standard as the basis of his values, but that does not mean he cannot look to anything at all.  One of the most important virtues of the consequentialist approach is that it grounds ethics in a rational psychology.  Consequentialism works as well as it does because, as Dacey points out, there are objective facts about what makes people happy and what makes them miserable.  It doesn’t take a genius to conclude that slapping people in the face is not a good way to improve people’s happiness, because that is pretty much universally (ignoring for the moment the complexity of masochism) something that people don’t like.  The Lonnie and Lonnie-Plus story illustrates the same point.  But this is as true of God as it is for human beings.  Any being, however absolute, is going to have certain logical psychological traits.  Some of these traits are even pretty easily deducible without any special revelation.  For example, a classical theistic God is going to naturally desire the happiness of all beings and hate the suffering of all beings.  Why?  Because God is omniscient, and therefore has the foundation for infinite empathy.  (Note that this does not imply that God will always seek the pleasure of every being in every circumstance, but it does imply that he will always seek the greatest good of being in general and if he does ordain or allow suffering he will do it only because of the greater good.)  For another example, I think we can deduce that God would naturally love and value himself infinitely more than all other beings, because he is in fact greater in being than all other beings.

Another objection might be that we cannot know what God’s values are, and so they are of no practical use to us in forming our ethics.  But I have already partially answered this in the previous paragraph.  Also, in addition to things that can be rationally deduced about the character of God, we cannot rule out the possibility of additional revelation from God providing us even more insight.  How do we know if a revelation is from God?  That is a big question, but the broad and simple answer is the same way we know anything else--by looking to see if its claims have verifiable evidence of some kind supporting them.

Of course, another obvious objection could be that God in fact doesn’t exist or that we have no evidence that he does exist.  Well, I think otherwise, though I do not have time to go into my reasons here.  Many of these objections raise points that would require us to go far beyond the scope of this paper to answer thoroughly, but I believe they are answerable.  What I want to stress, though, in keeping with the main thrust of the paper, is that whether or not the theistic solution works, it is the only possible solution that can work.  I hope I have made clear that naturalism cannot provide a foundation for objective ethics, and that only theism has the ingredients to do so.  If theism fails for some other reason, the conclusion will not be that naturalism can do it, but that nothing can and therefore there is no such thing as objective ethics.  But I believe that theism can indeed provide a satisfactory account, and thus that our human intuition that there really is objective ethics can be rationally shown to be valid.

1 My explanation of and argument for consequentialism here is, of course, not a thorough one. If I had more time, I could relate consequentialism to supposed alternatives, such as virtue ethics. Dr. Dacey does some of this himself in the book (see pp. 179-182). Since it is not my main point in this paper to thoroughly defend consequentialism, I am content to leave the argument in its current state. Suffice it to say that I agree with Dacey that the valid points of other accounts of ethics can easily be accommodated in an ultimately consequentialist approach, and that those good points are ultimately reducible to consequentialist principles.

2 Austin Dacey, The Secular Conscience (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), 174.

3 Ibid., 172.

4 Ibid., 174.

5 Ibid., 176.

6 Ibid., 177, quoting Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1982), p. 135.

7 Ibid., 177, 178.

Published on the feast of St. Paul Miki and Companions.

ADDENDUM 7/13/24:  In a private conversation, I was dialoguing with a philosopher about a year ago who was arguing that the mere existence of emotions - of various forms of pain and happiness - makes those emotions valuable.  I value my own happiness and hate my own pain.  This is psychologically natural and unavoidable.  Other beings feel the same way about their own happiness and pain.  So, since other beings are just as real as I am, and their perspectives and emotional experiences are just as real, those experiences, objectively speaking, are just as valuable as mine, even if they aren't as valuable to me because I am biased due to my limitation of only being able to experience my own perspective and emotions.

I agree with what this philosopher was saying.  Even if to me my experiences are more real and therefore more valuable, yet, objectively, from a more universal point of view - that is, a point of view that takes in more of reality than my limited viewpoint does - all experiences of all beings are equally real.  So to be self-centered is to be biased by ignorance, to see the world in a distorted way, having a narrow view that doesn't capture the fullness of reality.

Where we disagreed in the conversation was that this philosopher argued that all this would remain true even if there was no actually existing universal consciousness.  But I would say that that is not true.  Where do emotional experiences exist?  They exist nowhere but in the minds and perspectives of those who are experiencing them.  My emotional experiences could not exist if I did not exist to be experiencing them.  Your emotional experiences would not exist if you did not exist.  There can be no ultimate distinction between an emotional experience existing and an emotional experience being experienced by someone.  So if we want to say, as I think we should, that all experiences of all beings exist (thus providing us with the foundation to make the ethical claim that all people's experiences have real, objective value that we ought to recognize), we have to ask, where do they exist?  Where is the reality in which all these emotional experiences exist together?  It is not in my mind, or yours.  It can only be in the experience of a universal consciousness.  But in order for the full universe of experiences to actually exist in a universal consciousness, that universal consciousness has to be experiencing them, and therefore has to exist.  So if there is no universal consciousness, there can be no universal reality in which all experiences are real.  Therefore, the position that all emotional experiences are real and thus have objective value depends on the existence of a universal, objective consciousness - and, as St. Thomas Aquinas would say, this all men call God.