• Brendan Golledge
    130
    While working through the possibility of free will (discussed in my previous post), I went over my psychological model again, and also referenced Kohlberg's theory of moral development, and realized that it seemed like I could identify various forms of Christian ethics within Kohlberg's theory.

    To summarize, Kohlberg believed in 6 stages of moral development:
    1. Avoiding punishment
    2. Instrumental morality
    3. Good boy morality
    4. Law based morality
    5. Social contract
    6. Principle-based morality

    It seems to me that human beings are hardwired to seek after the good and try to avoid the bad. By default, we associate pleasure with the good and pain with bad, but our ideas of good and bad can be quite detached from pleasure and pain. For instance, we might come to believe that telling the truth is good, but this has nothing directly to do with physical pleasure or pain. Or we might believe that another's pleasure is good, even though it does not directly affect ourselves. So, our ideas of good and bad are rooted in our biology, but experience can teach us to think of almost anything as being good or bad.

    The level we start at is to seek immediate gratification. But next we learn that daddy (or mommy) punishes us if we do certain things. So, we learn that doing some things we might otherwise like is painful due to the punishment, and so we don't do them. Then a higher level of abstraction is to desire to please mommy & daddy as a goal in itself, rather than as a way of getting what we want. Then a higher level of abstraction is to value the contents of what daddy says, rather than the mere fact that he was the one who said it. Then a higher level is to see social organization as being dependent on these laws being carried out. Then the higher is to see the laws as coming from universal principles, which (perhaps) there is some freedom to choose.

    I will use the issue of premarital sex as an example. Obviously, sex feels good, so the immediate impulse is to do it when there is an opportunity. But I can think of these reasons not to do it:

    • Possibility of unwanted pregnancy
    • Possibility of disease
    • Unnecessary drama and heartache
    • Ruin your ability to pair-bond
    • Possibility of wasting time and money trying to seduce a woman who is unsuitable for long-term commitment
    • Possibility of false accusations
    • Disrespects your future husband (why should he pay to have you when you gave yourself to another man for free?)
    • Does not create a good environment for raising children
    • Uncommitted sexual relationships make later sexual commitments less credible

    So, the immediate pleasure of the sexual act might not always produce the maximal good in the long run.

    So, I see that the moral development of refraining from premarital sex, according to Kohlberg's model, as follows (it seems to me that for the lower levels, Dad and God can fill the same role):

    0. Sex feels good, so I will do it
    1. Daddy/God might punish me, so I won't do it
    2. I will do what I have to do to get Daddy/God to give me what I want
    3. I will not have premarital sex because I want Daddy/God to be happy
    4. It is wrong to have premarital sex (it's the law)
    5. Society (and possibly our relations with God) would break down if we don't keep up our end of the bargain
    6. Refraining from premarital sex is part of loving myself and my neighbor (here I'm taking love of self and neighbor as a principle, but I suppose in theory, some other principle could be used as a part of the Kohlberg model)

    It is interesting to me that Christianity can appeal to a person at so many levels simultaneously.

    In the past, when I have discussed why I don't believe in premarital sex, I have often gotten the response, "God does not exist." But this answer shows very limited intellectual or moral development, because my arguments for the likely bad outcomes from premarital sex do not depend on the existence of God. I wonder if most people cannot get to the end principle because secular society has gutted out the earlier steps (Don't make God/Daddy angry).

    When I was younger, I had the same attitude as above, but then, many things in my life did not go the way I wanted. I thought a lot about how to keep the bad things from happening again, and found very often that the conclusions I came to myself were the same as what the Christians had told me the whole time. It is my policy now, whenever there is something in the Bible that makes no sense to me (there still are some things), rather than mocking the Bible and concluding that it's stupid, I suspect that perhaps there is something that I don't fully understand yet. This doesn't even come from dogmatic faith that it's the word of God; it comes from repeated experience of finding wisdom in it.


    I think very many Christians are stuck in one of the earlier steps, since they focus a lot on the personhood of Jesus, but don't think much at all about his commandments. It's like they think that so long as they are on Team Jesus, then they will get rewards in heaven. They don't seem to have much appreciation for the content of his message.

    Many of the more serious Christians have very detailed ideas of sanctification and atonement (like exactly when at baptism/being born again/communion are you saved/sanctified). I wonder if this comes from a social contract model? Do they see our relationship with God as a contract (like he does xyz, so we have to do abc), and so they see the need to explain the nature of the contract in great detail? But it always seemed to me that I have never experienced the supernatural and that the Bible doesn't explain most of these things in great detail, so that it's impossible to know the truth of these detailed doctrines.

    Also, it seems to me that the only thing I can actually do in a given moment, when I see a choice between doing better or worse, is to choose better. If grace is in the hands of God, then it's kind of futile for me to think over the manner in which his grace is extended in great detail, since I cannot directly affect it by my own efforts.

    And the more I think about Jesus' commands (to love God and love one's neighbor), the more impressed I get with them and the more necessary they seem. If we think of God as whatever the highest thing we can think of is, then trying to love God means that we do the best thing that we can think of. "Do the best thing you can think of" seems like a reasonable moral command. Also, if I were not to treat a being similar to myself similar to how I'd want to be treated, then it means that I do not have an objective morality at all, but only a set of excuses for doing what I'd be doing anyway. It seems to me that Jesus' command to love our neighbors as ourselves is roughly equivalent to Kant's categorical imperative, and that this is a minimum necessary requirement for any consistent moral system. It also seems to me that these commands are actually aimed at an orientation of the heart, and that many of Jesus' other parables/commands help flush out how to orient one's heart properly.

    It is frustrating for me sometimes when dealing with Christians, because they very often seem to get stuck in arguments over Christology or the supernatural aspects of sanctification or atonement, when all I want to do is think about how to orient my heart properly. This seems good and beautiful to me, so I'd be interested in doing it with or without the promise of supernatural reward. But this is a bit side-tracked from the original purpose of this post.
  • Banno
    25.2k
    It seems to me that human beings are hardwired to seek after the good and try to avoid the bad.Brendan Golledge

    Is that anything more than the tautologous "what is good is what we seek, and what is bad is what we avoid"? How. And if so, then
    So, our ideas of good and bad are rooted in our biologyBrendan Golledge
    says that what we seek and what we avoid is rooted in biology.

    Might it not be that we ought fight against those supposed biological imperatives?

    Biology might inform, but cannot determined, what we ought do.

    Christianity is pretty irrelevant to ethics.
  • frank
    16k
    Christianity is pretty irrelevant to ethics.Banno

    Jesus was a moral nihilist of sorts, replacing the whole Mosaic law with the rule of love. Most of the human race isn't ready for Christianity. We still need moral laws like a bunch of bratty children.
  • Banno
    25.2k
    If you must. Christianity contributed an emphasis on charity to ethical thinking. But if this is only another thread about supposed Christian ethics, I'm out.

    The view on sex and marriage expressed in the OP is pretty patriarchal.
  • frank
    16k

    I guess this thread should go in the lounge. It's theology, not philosophy.
  • 180 Proof
    15.4k
    Christianity is pretty irrelevant to ethics.

    The view on sex and marriage expressed in the OP is pretty patriarchal.
    — Banno
    :up: :up:
  • L'éléphant
    1.6k
    It is frustrating for me sometimes when dealing with Christians, because they very often seem to get stuck in arguments over Christology or the supernatural aspects of sanctification or atonement, when all I want to do is think about how to orient my heart properly. This seems good and beautiful to me, so I'd be interested in doing it with or without the promise of supernatural reward.Brendan Golledge
    Since the precursor of Christianity was Stoicism, it is not surprising that the element of the divine powers or the Cosmos is embedded in the Christian belief system. The Stoics believed in Fate -- the swing of one's luck towards good fortune or bad fortune. If you act according to the divine principles, you have a better chance of receiving good fortune.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    2.9k


    I don't think know if these reasons are what St. Paul has at top of mind (and he speaks the most about the decision to get married):

    I Corinthians 7:7-9 & 25-35

    Yet I wish that all men were even as I myself am [i.e. single]. However, each has his own gift from God, one in this way, and another in that.

    But I say to the unmarried and to widows that it is good for them if they remain even as I. But if they do not have self-control, let them marry; for it is better to marry than to burn with passion...

    Now concerning virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I am offering direction as one who by the mercy of the Lord is trustworthy. I think, then, that this is good in view of the present distress, that it is good for a man to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be released. Are you released from a wife? Do not seek a wife. But if you marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. Yet such people as yourselves will have trouble in this life, and I am trying to spare you.

    But this I say, brothers, the time has been shortened, so that from now on those who have wives should be as though they had none; and those who weep, as though they did not weep; and those who rejoice, as though they did not rejoice; and those who buy, as though they did not possess; and those who use the world, as though they did not make full use of it; for the present form of this world is passing away.

    But I want you to be free from concern. One who is unmarried is concerned about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and his interests are divided. The woman who is unmarried, and the virgin, is concerned about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but one who is married is concerned about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to put a restraint on you, but to promote what is appropriate and to secure undistracted devotion to the Lord.


    The core concern here is being led away from God and towards the concerns of the world (and of the flesh). These issues are obviously going to be multiplied for someone engaged in multiple romantic relationships or a continuous stream of them, or even for someone dating without engaging in sex. And in the context of Paul's letters, we could see how this is based on principles in the fullest sense, as flowing from a unifying starting (and ending) point, the putting on of the new man, the crucifixion of the flesh, and divine union, to which the whole of life is oriented.
  • Brendan Golledge
    130
    According to my own understanding, Paul's justification for marriage is that it's the only healthy outlet for lust. "...for it is better to marry than to burn with passion"

    Jesus talked about how love of God and neighbor are the principles behind the 10 commandments. Not committing adultery and not coveting are two of the 10 commandments. It seems reasonable for me to conclude then that at least part of the reason for these commandments is love of neighbor. I think if I can discover by my own experience and reason good justifications for why premarital sex is harmful, then I have understood (at least in part) the purpose behind these commandments.

    I don't really see a contradiction between Paul and Jesus here. If marriage is the only healthy outlet for lust, then marriage is also the only way to have sex while loving yourself and your neighbor.

    I believe that marriage is healthy because lust is a savage desire in that it treats another person as an object. The sexual desire itself treats another person as an object to use for pleasure (similar to how one might treat ice cream or a hamburger). Women also typically use male lust as a means of getting other things that they want, such as money, vacations, or power. So, in the absence of commitment, men tell whatever lies they have to in order to get as much sex for as little as possible (thus using women as sex objects), and the women tell whatever lies they have to to get the men to fork over as much as possible in exchange for sex (thus using men like ATMs). It seems to me that the only respectful way to treat another human as an object like this (which seems to be innate in lust itself) is to offer your whole self as compensation. So, I see a healthy marriage as two selfish people freely giving the other what he/she can't help but selfishly desire.
  • Brendan Golledge
    130
    The view on sex and marriage expressed in the OP is pretty patriarchal.Banno

    "Patriarchy" literally means rule by the father. I think patriarchy is a good thing, because there's usually no one who will love his family more than the father. However, I don't think I said anything in my original post relating to who should be in charge. So, it seems to me that if you think what I said is patriarchal, even though I said nothing about rule by the father in the post, then it probably means that what I said sounds like what a loving father would tell his children.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    2.9k


    :up:

    The problem of objectification can be seen in the Genesis narrative. Leon Kass' The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis has an excellent treatment of this, although it tends to focus more on the Jewish scholarly tradition (IIRC Kass himself is Jewish).

    And then this is a major focus of John Paul II's The Theology of the Body in Simple Language. That text has a lot of philosophical depth (Karol Wojtyła being a philosopher before becoming pope), and it focuses on the risks of objectification as set against the view of the body as sacramental (e.g. St. Augustine), that is, an outward sign of inner changes. It also focuses on the idea of the body as a "gift," and we can see some parallels here with Ferdinand Ulrich's broader metaphysical notion of "being as gift," where every thing makes everything what it is by relation, with the ground of being, God, giving being.

    John Paul II draws a distinction between objectification, which is a type of concupiscence (the love of created things which obscures love for what is truly best), and the proper aim of marriage, which is the achievement of unity with another and through this the creation of a third in procreation. Marriage itself is sacramental. As Hegel puts it, the family is our first experience of being part of a unity, yet families, like us, can be more or less unified and perfected. John Paul draws an analogy between the love of the Father and the Son and the procession of the Spirit (the love between "Lover and Beloved" in St. Augustine's De Trinitate), and human generation.

    Anyhow, my broader point would be that the "Christian ethics of sex," as put forth in popular culture, often obscures what is most important by focusing on social norms, worldly goods, and even elevating a pernicious sort of possessiveness (e.g. fathers seeing their daughters as property, which was the official legal context in Roman law, but which obviously runs counter to Christianity, where many famous saints such as St. Lucy run away from bad betrothals in order to serve God). There is a tendency to mix Victorian-era moralism, which already had a pronounced slide towards secularism, with "Christianity."

    This slide becomes more pronounced in the context of "Cultural Christians," who want to advocate Christian ethics precisely as a way of achieving worldly goods in a secular frame. Such a frame does away with St. Bernard of Clairvaux's later "stages of love" (which are in some ways quite similar to Kohlberg's stages), since we can no longer love creatures on account of God. Instead, it seems to require remaining fixed in the earlier stage, loving (the idea of) God because of what God does for us.

    Note also that Kohlberg's stages terminate at St. Bernard's penultimate stage, "loving God (the principle of Goodness), for who God is." We do not make it further to "loving creatures (as concrete particulars) on account of God." We have, perhaps in deflated form, the path of eros leading up, but not the stream of agape flowing down.

    More broadly, Christianity's relevance to ethics would seem to lie precisely in its ability to point to the most general principle of all, the unifying One. This is what allows us to embrace Plato's focus on the whole and his historicism (represented in Christianity as Providence, e.g. Eusebius or Boethius), without falling into the totalitarian traps represented by "Platonism without the Good/One."

    As Arthur L. Herman writes in The Cave and the Light while framing Popper's assault on Plato and Hegel:

    For Aristotle, the locus of rational planning had always been the individual and his oikos , or household. In the same way, justice, or who deserves what, pertains to the individual person apart from his or her social or economic function. No notion of individual or natural right can take root without it. 11

    From the very start, Plato had argued the opposite. Justice belongs to the social and economic whole, the community. Indeed, it presupposes it. That community may be perfect (as in the Republic ) or imperfect, depending on whether it upholds an absolute standard of virtue or goodness. However, the same basic rule applies. To belong is to submit to a definition of virtue and justice that is common to all, whether Philosopher Ruler or Guardian or Worker, because all are part of the whole. It is those who stand outside the system — the ones Plato dubbed foreigners, or metics — who receive no justice at all. “In a sense, their very existence as the Other undermines it: a point Rousseau picked up when he said that Spartans’ hatred of foreigners sprang from their love and respect for one another.

    What had been a theoretical exercise for Plato twenty - four centuries ago, and was obscured for nearly two thousand years by the evolution of Christianity, would become a major exercise in social engineering in the modern age. After Saint Augustine, Plato’s community of justice had been expanded and redefined as Christendom [and beyond, recall St. Francis' trip to convert the Saracens]. Its sources of law and order and virtue were otherworldly. They were made softer, more broadly accessible and human, by Neoplatonism, in both its medieval and its Renaissance forms. Saint Bernard’s devotion to a religion of the heart does not make him appealing to the modern humanist. Conversely, Erasmus was deeply devoted to the welfare and advance of Christendom. But no one would ever accuse either one of being a totalitarian.

    When that Neoplatonist frame fell away, however, what was left was a commitment to the community of virtue in a starkly secular form. The Other for medieval Christianity had been preeminently outsiders: the Muslim, the Jew, and the infidel. In modern Europe, the Other suddenly appeared from within the community as dangerous parasites to be exposed and removed. The Other became Robespierre’s counterrevolutionaries; then Marx’s class enemies; and finally Hitler’s useless mouths and racial degenerates, including the Jews.

    “The first question we ask,” wrote one of Lenin’s minions, “is — to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education, profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This,” he added, “is the essence of the Red Terror .” 12 It was not a sentence Plato or Augustine could have written. But Robespierre could, and did. Likewise Lenin and Goebbels.

    The collapse of Platonized Christianity under the Enlightenment assault, along with the Neoplatonist kingship of Louis XIV, had left certain hostages to fortune. The Romantics rescued some of them. But when men sought absolutes in the political sphere again — as they were bound to do — they found them in a communitarian vision shorn of any compassion or pity.

  • Banno
    25.2k
    I think patriarchy is a good thing, because there's usually no one who will love his family more than the father.Brendan Golledge
    Ownership is not love.

    Domestic violence statistics do not support your account.
    NSWauditor.png?format=2500w
  • Banno
    25.2k
    Cheers. Obvious stuff. Notice that did not address the more pressing critique, that yet again, we have someone claiming that what is the case is what ought be the case; here, that "our ideas of good and bad are rooted in our biology" and hence we ought do as Golledge wrongly understands biology proscribes. There are two errors here: the lesser, that biology determines our actions, the greater, that Golledge's interpretations of the supposed biological imperatives are correct.
  • Brendan Golledge
    130
    I believe that you wrote a sincere reply, but it's very long and I'm at work right now, so I won't read it right now. I might read it later.

    You can also find statistics that say the exact opposite. I googled for, "most domestic violence initiated by women" and found several sources corroborating this. You can do the google search yourself. You can also find lots of statistics showing that most serial killers are raised by single mothers, and that children raised without a father in general are poorer and have more behavioral issues. I am not going to get into it here because I know that you will just argue and deny that anything that doesn't support feminism is biased. I also just did a search for, "life expectancy of married vs unmarried women", and Google's AI says that on average, married women live longer. This is not consistent with the view that men are a net negative for women. As I understand it, when a woman is murdered, the murderer is statistically most-likely to be the husband, but this is for the same reason that murderers of children are most likely to be the mother; these are just the people that you spend the most time with. But I suspect that this nuance might be lost on you. Also, you did not even accurately represent my argument, so I'm not going to argue with you anymore.
  • Brendan Golledge
    130
    I read your post on my lunch break. Your reply was interesting and referenced a lot of sources that I am unfamiliar with. I think I might order that book on Genesis. I think I would have to do research on more of your sources in order to be able to make an intelligent reply.
  • Brendan Golledge
    130
    I googled for "Four Degrees of Love Bernard of Clairvaux", and I agree that it is remarkably similar to what Kohlberg said. It is interesting to me that they came to such similar conclusions when they lived so far apart in time and had such different perspectives on the world.

    I personally have a hard time with believing that Jesus/The Holy Spirit is actively guiding the church, largely due to the confusion in the church. If the same voice is talking to everyone, why doesn't everyone agree? But I can test the psychological or moral wisdom of Jesus, proverbs, or other Christian doctrines in my own life, and I find very consistently that they are good. I believe at the very minimum, that the Bible is phenomenologically true, meaning that it is true about what it feels like to be a human and to struggle with making the right choices.
  • Banno
    25.2k
    You can also find statistics that say the exact opposite.Brendan Golledge

    Well, here's that search:

    https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=most+domestic+violence+initiated+by+women
    Folk reading on can check for themselves that the data does not show "the exact opposite", whatever you meant by that. Even the most generous readings will only shoe at best equal levels of violence between males and females.

    Yes, the situation is more complex than the pie chart I posted. Your claim specifically was that
    I think patriarchy is a good thing, because there's usually no one who will love his family more than the father.Brendan Golledge
    There there is no evidence to support this, and considerable evidence to the contrary.

    Summations are typically as follows:
    Domestic violence is a gendered crime, with women being much more likely than men to be the victims of violence and to experience a range of associated harms such as homelessness, assault-related injury and deathFemale perpetrated domestic violence: Prevalence of self-defensive and retaliatory violence

    The Australian statistics show that only one third of victims are male; that Male and female victims receive very similar numbers and types of injuries; that Males and females are just as likely to engage in coercive controlling behaviours; the Men who have experienced partner violence are 2 to 3 times more likely than women to have never told anybody about it.

    The remainder of your post, concerning life expectancy, serial killers and so on, reeks of confirmation bias. As does
    Also, you did not even accurately represent my argument, so I'm not going to argue with you anymore.Brendan Golledge
    So, you are not here to have your convictions questioned. Fine.

    Notice that ↪Brendan Golledge did not address the more pressing critique, that yet again, we have someone claiming that what is the case is what ought be the caseBanno
    You again did not address this.
  • Brendan Golledge
    130
    I am not going to address any of your lies
  • Banno
    25.2k
    I am not going to address any of your liesBrendan Golledge
    You are not obligated to answer my criticisms of your beliefs. .

    But they will still be here, even if you don't.
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