Harvard Justice: A Christian Perspective

Harvard Justice is a series of lectures recorded at Harvard University on the subject of the philosophy of ethics.  If that sounds stuffy, academic and uninteresting then I urge you to suspend your judgement and take a look.  The series is free on Youtube and it would be worthwhile to at least view the first couple presentations. The professor is Michael Sandel who is engaging in his presentation an excellent facilitator for the student interaction.  The scenarios and thought experiments did make me think and think in a constructive way.  Sandel presents the various ways of approaching ethics such consequentialism, libertarianism and others.  Again, if this  series sounds stuffy but I assure you it is not boring.  One thing I like is the Sandel presents each philosophical approach objectively and clearly.

While I definitely recommend this series, from a Christian point of view there is something missing.  The students engaged in some good interaction offering a variety of perspectives however the basis or foundation of the opinions was missing.  It is true that all the students have  a strong sense of moral values even if they did disagree on various points.  However the basis for those values was just one’s experience and feelings.  In the opening lecture, one goal of the was to examine the presuppositions for ethical values however, in the end, it was each individual’s feelings of right and wrong which formed the basis for those values.  Without a set of transcendent moral values and duties, it appears we are left with various opinions.  Who is to determine whose opinions shall prevail?  From a Christian perspective, every person has a set of moral values written on their conscience.  It is revealed to us in the Bible that God has written his law upon each human heart.  But the origin of those ethical values is not individual feelings and experiences which leads to relativism but rather these values and duties are objectively true (i.e. true for everybody) since the origin is from God.  Without the foundation, each person’s opinion (or each person’s ethical philosophy) is just one of many.  From this observation comes one of the strongest arguments of God’s existence and it goes like this.  It is called the Moral Argument.  1)Without God, there can be no objective moral values and duties.  2)There are objective moral values and duties (based on foundational human knowledge).  3)Therefore there is a God.  It is a deductive argument so to deny the conclusion, you must deny at least one the the premises.  So if you disagree, which premise do you disagree with?

“The paradigm itself is non-negotiable”

We like to think of science as a neutral enterprise with scientists just following where the evidence leads.  The presuppositions of scientists are often unspoken and rarely even considered.  Thomas Kuhn wrote an influential book in 1963 titled “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.  Kuhn pointed out that scientists do their work within a specific paradigm.  During those rate times of rapid scientific change, the paradigm also changes.  During “normal” (i.e. slow, progressive change) scientists work entirely with the given paradigm.  Kuhn writes “When scientists share a paradigm they do not just agree on certain scientific propositions, the agree also on how future scientific research in their field should proceed, on which problems are the pertinent one to tackle, on what the appropriate methods for solving those problems are, on what acceptable solution of the problems would look like and so on. “  In the book Philosophy of Science, A Very Short Introduction the author S. Okasha writes “Above all, Kuhn stressed that normal scientists are not trying to test the paradigm.  On the contrary, they accept the paradigm unquestioningly and conduct their research within the limits it sets.”  Mr. Okasha writes “The paradigm itself is non-negotiable”.  Evidence for this is in the emerging field of Intelligent Design (ID).  Today’s mainstream scientific paradigm is macro evolution and anything outside of that is dismissed without a second glance.  This is despite the fact a growing minority of scientists have serious doubts about Darwinian evolution and that at least 50 peer-review articles have already been published that support Intelligent Design.  In my previous blogs I have given a quick overview with references pointing to evidence of ID.  Yet with all this accumulating evidence most academic biologists irrationally resort to anger and name calling.  They call the research ID religious creationism even though ID uses empirical evidence only and does not refer to any religious tradition or text.  Those researchers who do not have tenure at Universities support ID only at their peril of being fired from their position.  See the podcast Evolution’s Glass Ceiling to learn more about this.  Thomas Kuhn’s theory of how science works is being played out before our very eyes.  Scientists do not necessarily follow to where the evidence leads if it leads out of the current scientific paradigm.  This creates a degree of frustration for ID researchers but should not come as a surprise.  To repeat, “The paradigm itself is non-negotiable”.

To learn more about Intelligent Design, here are some web links

http://www.discovery.org/csc/

http://www.idthefuture.com/

http://www.evolutionnews.org/

Why People Do Bad Things

In 2006 I became intrigued by the story of David Verholt.  Mr. Verholt was working as a vice president of KeyBank in Cleveland Ohio making about $110,000 annually.  In 2006 he was arrested for an embezzling scheme at KeyBank in which he took $40M in fraudulent loans.  One intriguing aspect to this is that this went on for 10 years before he was caught.  One would think the internal controls at Key Bank would not let this continue for this length of time.  The other more intriguing aspect is why?  How does a successful family man with a good income get involved with this level of unethical behaviour?  Since this new story was published I would, from time to time, think about this question.  Of course David Verholt is just one person among many including Bernie Madoff, Enron execs, Worldcom execs, etc.  There has also been recently many journalists of unethical behaviour.  The  August 2, 2012 Christian Science Monitor reported on the story of Jonah Lehrer who resigned from the New Yorker magazine after admitting to fabricating quotations and attributing them to Bob Dylan.  The article went on to list other recent ethical failures by journalists.  From the article I quote,

“Two years ago, Daily Beast chief investigative reporter Gerald Posner resigned after it was revealed that he’d plagiarized sentences from other writers’ stories – he says he did so inadvertently, by rewriting things he’d read online. The New York Times was stunned in 2003 when it discovered reporter Jayson Blair had fabricated and plagiarized stories.
The problem is not limited to print. Earlier this year, Mike Daisey was forced to admit he had exaggerated storytelling about Chinese factories making iPods and Apple hardware in a story broadcast on the public radio program “This American Life.”
The most notorious case might be Janet Cooke, whose Pulitzer-Prize winning 1980 Washington Post story featured a person who did not exist. “

The cumulative effect of these ethical failures gives one pause. Are these just character flaws of a certain minority of people? Are these people “bad eggs”?  As I look upon these things from a Christian worldview, the Christian doctrine of the universal sinful nature appears very evident indeed.  This doctrine states that within each man and women there is a flawed (often very flawed) way of thinking. Although we know the right thing to do we (including me), very often fail to do the right thing.  It is not a matter of knowledge but rather one of the will.   I know that this line of thinking is diametrically opposed to current of popular thought today but there seemed to be no alternative explanation.  Therefore I was interested in an episode of NPR’s Planet Money broadcast earlier this year entitled “Why People Do Bad Things”.  I was interested because here was an opportunity to explain bad behavior from a secular perspective.  The program focused on a man Toby Groves who started off in business with very high ethical standards and even made a vow to his father that he would not fall into disgrace (you need to listen to the podcast).  Yet in the end, Toby Groves committed a multi-million dollar bank fraud, drove several companies out of business resulting in job losses of hundreds of people.   How could this happen?  Did Toby have an unusual character flaw?  Was Toby just a “bad egg”?  Lamar Pierce of Washington University in St. Louis weighed in on that question.  Dr. Pierce commented that this was actually not that unusual and that most of us could be lured into the same unethical behaviour given the same context.  But that still leaves the question why when a person is in that position that he crosses that ethical line.  What were Toby Groves and David Verhotz thinking?  Here is where a University of Notre Dame professor was interviewed to answer this psychological question.  The answer given is that when one is in the business frame of mind, one loses the ability to evaluate right and wrong.  She said that in certain contexts, the cognitive faculties do not work properly.  Toby couldn’t process the choices put before him. This almost sounds like a symptom of a mental illness in that Toby did not know right and wrong. (This also begins to resemble to doctrine of original sin!)  After listening to this program I realized that these explanations from secular academia fall far short of a satisfying reason for bad behaviour.  Of course Toby knew right and wrong and he knew the line he was crossing but did it anyway.  This wasn’t the case of incomplete knowledge.  Clearly the secularist has no explanation.  Could it be that the inference to the best explanation is the very idea that most people do not want to hear, namely,  the Christian idea of the basic sinfulness of man?  But why should it be hard to believe since it is the one Christian doctrine that is proven every day in the morning newspaper.  To quote Peter Kreeft, “Once the main obstacle to believe in Christianity was the good news. It seemed like a fairy tale; too good to be true. Today, the main obstacle is the bad news; people just don’t believe in sin even though that is the only Christian doctrine that can be proven by reading daily newspapers.”  Most people believe that they are like the children in Garrison Keeler’s Lake Woebegon - above average.  Yet those pesky facts do have way of getting in the way of our opinions.