A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies



Philosophy & Theology Pre-UPaper 1 – Introduction to Philosophy & TheologyPlatoAristotle HYPERLINK \l "Rationalismempiricism" Rationalism vs empiricismRelativism vs AbsolutismEuthyphro Dilemma Rationalism vs fideismPropositional vs non-propositional revelation Sacred textsConscienceFree Will & DeterminismPaper 1Plato & AristotlePlato: Theory of Forms; the analogies of the Sun, the Divided Line, the Cave; the nature of body and soul and their inter-relationship; the Charioteer; the Good. Aristotle: empirical understanding of the nature of body and soul; the nature of causation – the doctrine of the Four Causes; the Good; the Archer; the Prime Mover.PlatoEverything we experience through our senses changes and is imperfect. Heraclitus was an ancient Greek Philosopher who thought that because everything was in ‘flux’, true eternal unchanging knowledge is impossible. Plato agreed with Heraclitus that knowledge cannot be gained from a posteriori observation but thought that nonetheless we have somehow managed to gain knowledge of mathematics and abstract concepts like perfect beauty (aesthetics), justice (morality) and relational concepts like ‘equal’.Plato concludes there must be a world where things are perfect and unchanging (immutable) which he called the World of Forms. The world of forms is not some distant world like heaven – it is the true reality. What we see (the world of particulars/appearances) is not the true reality. Everything we experience in this world is a vague shadow of what it really is.The argument from recollection/innate concepts is how Plato responds to Heraclitus. We are born with a dim recollection of the forms because our immortal soul observes them before being reincarnated. Anamnesis is the process of re-remembering these forms through a posteriori sense experience. Plato claims we have a concept of perfect justice, beauty, equal, perfect circles and geometry, but have never seen perfect instances of such things in the world of appearances, therefore we must have gained those concepts from the world of the forms.Justice and beauty.Is this really true? Are people born with a sense of justice or is it gained by growing up in a certain culture? Hasn’t people’s view of justice changed over time, and isn’t it different between different cultures?Some psychologists would argue that we are born ‘tabula rasa’ (blank slate) meaning our mind is empty on birth and we learn mainly from our primary caregiver. Their beliefs (e.g about beauty or justice) will be transmitted into your mind).Plato could try to respond by arguing that such changes and differences occur due to culture moving people further from the original concept they got from the world of the forms. It’s true that cultures change someone’s view of what counts as justice/beauty, but how did everyone get this idea of justice/beauty itself?There could be an alternative way we got these innate ideas – perhaps from evolution.Arguably justice and beauty are subjective and therefore there is no such thing as ‘perfect’ justice or beauty as that is in the eye of the beholder.‘Equal’. We have never seen two things which are perfectly equal, e.g two sticks of exactly equal length, so we cannot have derived our concept of equal from the world of appearances.Arguably two sticks which are similar enough in length for the difference to be imperceptible will ‘appear’ equal and we can therefore derive the concept of equal from them even though they are not equal. The same could be said for circles, since the full moon ‘appears’ to be a perfect circle.Geometry. In The Meno Plato tells the story of how Socrates attempts to prove that a slave boy who had no education could nonetheless be prompted by a series of questions and some shapes drawn in the sand, to figure out how to solve a geometry question. The conclusion is that humans have innate knowledge of geometric truths gained from when our souls existed in the world of forms.An empiricist could respond that we gain the concepts of number and shape from experience and then gain mathematical knowledge when analysing those concepts. The slave boy may not have had any mathematical training, but he had seen shapes of objects in his life – thereby gaining concepts of shape and geometry. The geometric knowledge is therefore gained via analytic a priori reasoning about concepts gained from experience.Hume argues we can gain concepts of perfect things through a posteriori means by infering from imperfect things. Hume claims we take our concept of ‘imperfect’ and simply imagine the negation ‘not imperfect’ to arrive at ‘perfect’.Plato thinks we get knowledge of the forms through a priori reason, not a posteriori empirical sense experience – since that perceives merely a vague shadow of the world of forms. Humans ignorantly believe the particulars are the true world.Forms are not simply a shape but the essence of an object.E.g. the form of a table is tableness, the complete essence of the tableThe Analogy of the Cave illustrates this. Plato asks us to imagine some prisoners in a cave who cannot move due to being chained, and can only look in one direction at a wall on which appear shadows of real objects moving behind the prisoners that they cannot see. Those shadows are all the prisoners have ever known, and so they develop a language to talk about them as if they were real. One day a prisoner escapes, is temporarily blinded by the sun, and then sees the real world. He returns to the cave to explain the truth to the other prisoners, but they cannot understand him.It seems that people can actually understand Philosophers though, as proven by their significant impact on culture and book sales.Prisoners – PeopleShackled – Belief in sense (ignorance)Shadows – Sense experienceOne day one escapes the cave – PhilosopherIs temporarily blinded by the sun – Acquiring knowledge of the form of the goodThen sees the real world outside – Acquiring knowledge of the world of the formsReturns to the cave, tries to explain what they saw, but the other prisoners are unable to understand – Philosopher unable to explain these ideasThe relationship between forms and particulars.Particulars are imperfect copies/representations of the form they participate in of which they gain characteristics. When I look at a tree I am really looking at the eternal immutable form of treeness, but because of my ignorance I see a particular tree which is transient and mutable, it will decay and change into something else as it is in a state of flux.The tree gets what little treeness it has by ‘partaking’ in the form of treeness. It’s like looking at an object in a broken mirror and perceiving a visually distorted version of it. In the case of Plato’s form however, we are perceiving the forms through the broken mirror of our ignorant minds and what we perceive is not a mere visual distortion but a distortion in reality.Plato seems to think that the world can be divided up into categories like tree, table, beauty, etc. Plato doesn’t see how we could recognize a tree unless we already have a perfect abstract ideal of a tree; ‘treeness’, against which we can compare and thus recognize a particular tree due to it being an imperfect representation of treeness. Since the world of appearances is in flux, how is it that we manage to recognize different things through categorisation? Since the river we step into the first time is no longer the same river it seems impossible to think of the world in an orderly categorized way if all we have to go on is a world of flux. So Plato concludes we actually have a dim recollection of the forms of which the world of appearances share some dim shadow-like characteristics by which we are able to recognize and categorize them.Wittgenstein argued that actually there is no perfect form or abstract ideal of a category. He gave an example of a family picture. There are similarities between the members of the family but it would be absurd to suggest this required a perfect abstracted form of the family. Instead we recognize someone as a member of a family due to their family resemblances. Similarly, we recognize a member of a category as being so due to its family resemblances to other things in that category. The world is not a set of definable categories which the human mind can perfectly divide up. It’s not clear where the boundary between tree and bush are for example, in some species. Humans divide the world linguistically and conceptually not according to, or at least not only according to, an objective set or method categorization. We categorize the world in a disorganised haphazard way when and where we require certain use of the category in question. The categories are determined by social convention, not objective reality. Categories are not metaphysical, they are conceptual schemes mapped onto a human experience of the world for the purpose of performing a specific function or use. As such, they have indeterminate boundaries and are subject to revision. What someone decides to call a tree might depend on the use for which the category ‘tree’ has in their social environment. There is no perfect form of ‘treeness’.The Divided Line refers to Plato’s view on the different levels of reality and how we understand each of them. They are like stages of progression from the lowest that the prisoners had in the cave towards the truest and highest that the Philosopher who escapes the cave can achieve.Type of Knowledge or OpinionKnowledge state of the mindType of ObjectMethod of the psyche or eyeRelative truth and realityNoesisPerfect knowledgeKnowledge of the form of the Good and other formsThe mind making no use of likeness HighestDianolaImperfect knowledgeMathematical and logical ideasUsing the mind rather than the eye but still involving likenesses HighPistisOpinion based on belief about visible thingsVisible thingsThe eye makes predictions when observing visible thingsLowEikasiaOpinion based on imagination and speculation about the likeness of visible thingsLikeness of visible thingsThe eye makes guesses when observing likenesses of visible thingsLowestPlato’s views on the soul was that the body was like a prison for the soul, trapping it in this world of appearances. He thought our souls came from the world of forms and had a vague memory of the forms.Dualism: - The view that there are two fundamentally different types of existence, e.g. mental and physical.Look up charioteer analogy.Plato’s cycle of opposites argument. Every quality exists because of its opposite - big things are big because there are small things. People who are awake now are only so because they were asleep before, and vice versa. Plato claims the same is true of death. Therefore there is a cycle of the opposites of life and death, people continually die and are reborn. Opposites don’t actually exist, they’re just mental constructs. In reality things are only ‘big’ or ‘small’ relative to something else. What looks big to us might look small to something much bigger. So ‘big’ and small cannot be intrinsic or objective as they only obtain relatively. There’s no reason to think life and death cycle like waking and sleeping.Modern science seems to get beyond our senses or what Plato would call ‘the shadows’ to tell us how reality is, e.g. E=MC2. It even allows us to manipulate the shadows, e.g. landing a space rocket on the moon. This should not be possible if they are mere shadows, therefore Plato is wrong. He’s right to think there is something beyond them, but it’s empirical evidence from science which shows what it really is, and it’s not the world of the forms.Physicist Max Tegmark believes in the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis which is that the universe isn’t just amenable to mathematic description but actually is ‘made’ from pure mathematics in some sense. That could be argued to be similar to Plato’s idea of the forms.Aristotle’s third man argument. Plato claims that if there is a group of things which share characteristics, like a group of trees, then the explanation is that they must all be partaking in a form of treeness. However, Aristotle argues that we then have a new group of things which share characteristics, the trees and the form of treeness, which according to Plato’s logic must therefore have a form in which they partake, yet that simply creates a new group of things which share characteristics which require another form and so on forever. Plato responds that forms cannot partake of anything but themselves. The particulars partake in a form because they are imperfect copies of it but the forms themselves cannot then be grouped with the particulars since they are what the particulars really are.The form of the good is like the sun according to Plato, in that it both illuminates and allows us to see the world of the forms, and yet also nourishes and is responsible for all the existence of life and all the other forms, so it is the highest form. All the other forms have goodness in them. The Form of the Good is the source of truth, beauty and justice. Understanding the form of the good makes it impossible for you to do wrong and so Plato says you should rule the people as a ‘philosopher king’.Arguably Plato is just projecting his psychological need for goodness onto reality. Physical objects do perhaps have some basis in reality beyond our mere perception but ‘goodness’ is not even really perceived outside our mind so in what sense could it be a shadow of a more real thing?Aristotle’s criticism. It’s simple to see how e.g ‘tall’ would have a single essence of ‘tallness’ however ‘the good’ seems different as it is spoken about in many different ways. That makes it seem unlikely that goodness could be one simple thing like Plato’s conception of the form of the good requires. Aristotle argues that things which can be put under a single idea or form should be confinable to a single subject area or discipline. The good of war comes under the science of strategy, the good related to diseases is in the science of medicine, the good of bodily exercise comes under gymnastics. Nietzsche claimed that Philosophers invent their theories to justify their pre-conceived prejudices. Arguably Plato just felt like he should be in power and so invented the form of the good as an excuse. The fact that only those in power would be able to see this form of the good adds to that suspicion.Arguably Nietzsche commits the genetic fallacy however; assuming that the motivations someone might have for coming to a belief can be used to prove it false. Plato could have invented the form of the Good as an excuse to rule, and yet there still be a form of the good.Nonetheless Nietzsche’s approach could be considered to provide not a disproof but a justifiable scepticism of Plato.Post-modern philosophers would argue that ‘reason’ is not some special objective faculty of the human mind to reach ‘the truth’, it is culturally determined to an extent. For example, pre-modernity had a background structure of belief in religion. The intellectuals of the time tried to interpret and figure out the competing implications of that. That’s what reason meant in pre-modern times. Modernity involved a systematic questioning of pre-modernity which brought modern science however it also “became very ridged about categories” e.g subjective vs objective, rational vs irrational, reason vs faith, private vs public. Post-modern philosophers like Derrida suggest there is a pre-propositional aspect to experience which does not yield to these categories, especially with art and ethics. So, Plato’s insistence that reason can apprehend objective beauty and goodness is arguably just a reflection of the way in which what humans call ‘reason’ was culturally influenced at the time. Some argue that our reason evolved to help us survive, not to help us figure out the truth about reality and therefore pure reason without evidence to keep it in line with reality will fail.AristotleAristotle rejected Plato’s epistemology and the theory of the forms with it. Instead of basing knowledge on a priori logic, Aristotle thought we could gain knowledge through a posteriori empiricism. Plato thought the true reality did not change, Aristotle wanted to come up with an empiricist understanding of change instead.Actuality is the way something is in its current state. Potentiality is the way actual things could become given certain conditions. If the conditions are met, it will change to its potentiality and that will become its actuality. To go from cause to an effect something must change by going through 4 causes.Cause:- Material (what it is made of)- Formal (what its characteristics/essence are)- Efficient (how it comes to be – what exerts the force)- Final (what it is for)Effect:- Telos - the final end towards which something is directed due to its nature.Aristotle thought that all change in the universe must be explained by these four causes.Aristotle observed that if an object is moved, it keeps moving and then stops. Aristotle thought that objects which are moved simply run out of movement after a while and that the natural state of objects was to be at rest. He therefore thought that motion which does not stop required some special explanation. It was this view which led to his inference of the existence of a prime mover of the universe. Aristotle then asked the four causes of the universe.The Material cause of the universe is determined by the constituent elements of matter and the ether (space between matter).The Formal cause of the universe is in the nature of things, such as the nature of stars to rotateThe Efficient cause in the universe is the movement of the stars which changes the ether which maintains the rotation of the planets which maintains changes in the planet’s atmosphere, which maintains the processes of change on the earth. Aristotle had a geocentric view of the universe; that the earth was in the centre of it. Aristotle then questions what maintains the motion of the stars, inferring that there must be something moving them which itself must be unmoved. The cause of the motion of the stars and thereby all movement on earth must itself be unmoved, or its movement would require merely another mover. There cannot be an infinite chain of motion as that would never get started. This prime mover must therefore have been unmoved and therefore cannot change. It is therefore pure actuality. So, it cannot be material since it seems all material things are subject to change. It must be a mind, but arguably it cannot be thinking about anything happening outside itself since such things are subject to change and its thoughts would change if their object changed. So it must be eternally contemplating itself. The way the prime mover sustains the change in the world must therefore be due to some sort of attraction of the things in this world to it.The prime mover is that unmoved mover. It is not the efficient cause of the universe, since Aristotle believed the universe was eternal. The Prime Mover is responsible for the everlasting motion and change of the universe. Since it cannot be moved, it cannot change and is thus pure actuality. It is only form but no materiality, a kind of mind, which eternally contemplates itself, otherwise it would contemplate things which change and would then itself change. Our universe is attracted to the prime mover in a sort of orbit. That is how the prime mover sustains the pattern of change from actuality to potentiality in our universe.Aristotle’s views on the soul was that the soul was the formal cause of the body. Made an analogy with a stamp imprint in some wax. The stamp has no actual positive existence separable from the wax, yet it nonetheless gives form to the wax. This is the relationship between the body and the soul for Aristotle. ?Aristotle rejected the idea of the world of forms and some non-physical aspect to the body like a soul which could have come from such a world. Aristotle believed in a posteriori evidence over a priori reasoning. Strangely, Aristotle claimed that ‘rational thought’ can live on after death, causing many philosophers to claim he had contradicted himself. The question is in what sense rational thought lives on. Is it in the life and education we give to our children, the legacy of the actions and works we achieve in life? That doesn’t seem to break away from monism. However the idea of ‘rational thought living on’ seems more than that, hence the problem. It’s not clear what Aristotle means.Aristotle thought the soul or ‘form’ of an axe depended on its purpose – chopping wood. The purpose of a human, Aristotle thought, was to think rationally, so our soul enables us to do that. This seems disproved by modern science which tells us our brain enables us to think rationally, not some soul or ‘form of the body’. Also, arguably there is no purpose to humans or anything else like axes. Axes can be used for anything, it’s subjective what purpose we give to it. Although Aristotle is therefore a materialist, his conception of the physical as having purpose would be rejected by most modern materialists. Newton challenged Aristotle’s belief that an object which is moved will simply stop moving by itself. Newton claimed instead that when moved, an object will move until met by an equal and opposite reaction. The problem with observing this is that on earth, the strong gravity and effect of friction amounts to an equal and opposite reaction on the movement of an object which causes it to stop. It doesn’t just stop by itself due to rest being its natural state, as Aristotle thought. This means that Aristotle’s inference that the constant motion in the universe must be maintained by something like a prime mover is false.Newton’s ideas are most clearly illustrated in the example of a vacuum – space. In outer space where there is less gravity and friction, pushing an object in a certain direction will cause it to move in that direction potentially forever, unless it happens to hit another object or is pulled off course by the gravity of something like a planet.Although Newton is seen by scientists as disproving Aristotle, arguably Einstein disproved Newton too and who knows which future physics might disprove Einstein. Arguably science just continually changes its preferred view and so it’s unreliable as a source of knowledge.Scientist Neil DeGrasse Tyson responded that Einstein did not ‘disprove’ Newton. Newton’s laws of motion are still accepted as true. Physicists now know much more about the universe than Newton did, however, so that opens up a space of knowledge around Newton’s theorems which require embedding in a different theory. Newton’s views still work for what they explain, it’s just that we now know there is much more in the universe to explain which requires other theories like Einsteins’. Aristotle’s physics however is not regarded as accurate by modern physicists even for some small part of the universe.Sartre argued that there was no objective purpose because “existence precedes essence” meaning humans exist before they have a defined purpose and so have to subjectively define their purpose for themselves. Sartre’s argument was a psychological one, that people cling to fabricated notions of objective purpose like religion or Aristotle’s ‘final cause’ because they are afraid of not having a purpose, more specifically they are scared of the intensity of the freedom that comes from having to create their own purpose which Sartre thought led to feelings of abandonment (by God/objective reality), anguish (over the weight of being completely responsible for your actions) and despair (over our inability to act exactly as we’d like due to the constraints of the world). It’s much easier to believe in objective purpose than face that existential angst.As Sartre’s argument is psychological, he does not provide metaphysical grounds for rejecting Aristotle’s final cause and so is arguably committing the genetic fallacy. Nonetheless pointing out that humans have a psychological need to believe in objective purpose, if true, should make us extra sceptical of claims that it exists and if Aristotle’s arguments for it fail, or if he provided insufficient argument for it, we might consider Sartre’s psychological argument as accurate.Plato’s a priori logic vs Aristotle’s a posteriori empirical observationPlato believed that because the sensible world was in flux, eternal unchanging truth could not be gained from it. It was thus that he created his world of forms to suggest everything we see are just shadows of the real. Aristotle disagreed, thinking that he could observe in the flux patterns of change which pointed to a deep underlying causal mechanism from which could be deduced the cause of everything – the prime mover. Plato’s theory of forms is one explanation of a sensible world of flux. However, there could be other explanations. Perhaps it was created by an 11th dimensional alien. Perhaps it was made from quantum fluctuations. There are an infinite number of possible explanations we could come up with. Therefore, unless we have some evidence to anchor the world we perceive to a merely logically possible theory, that theory has a 1/infinity chance of being the right one. Aristotle based his prime mover theory off the evidence of his senses and therefore had a better chance of being right. Aristotle nonetheless only believed in empirical observation, not empirical experiment. For two thousand years people believed Aristotle that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects, until Galileo, according to legend, proved otherwise by dropping one heavy and one light object from the leaning tower of Pisa, and it was seen that they hit the ground together. Aristotle’s views on causation and the prime mover are considered completely wrong by modern science, as are Plato’s, so arguably neither are better?While Aristotle was not truly scientific in the modern sense, nonetheless he believed in empirical observation which gave his theory a better chance of connecting to reality than Plato’s did, and created the epistemological method which would lead to modern empirical methods and the resulting fuller picture of reality we have today.Rationalism vs EmpiricismHume’s empiricismStep 1: Locke argued that the mind is ‘tabula rasa’ at birth – a blank slate with no innate concepts. He argues all our ideas come from either sensation or reflection. Sensation is when our senses experience objects in the external world. Reflection occurs when we experience the ‘internal operations of our minds’.Step 2: The sensation of yellow is quite different from the concept of yellow we gain from reflection however. Locke’s distinction doesn’t account for that. Hume proposed a different set of distinctions to solve this. Everything our mind directly experiences is a perception. Perceptions from the external world are impressions, perceptions from inside our mind are ideas. Ideas are usually less forceful and vivid. Something remembered is less vivid than the original experience (except in special cases like madness). This is because ideas are ‘faint copies’ of impressions. Ideas can be simple or complex. A simple idea is one which cannot be broken down any further, e.g redness. Complex ideas are combinations of simple ideas. A red rose is a complex idea made from the combination of the simple ideas of redness, the smell of a rose, the texture, and so on.Hume’s copy principle argues that all simple ideas are copies of impressions. All ideas in the mind therefore ultimately derive from impressions. Therefore, there are no innate concepts. Hume’s proof is to challenge anyone to think of a simple idea that was not copied from an impression. He also points out that lacking an impression results in a lack of the concept, e.g. someone blind from birth lacks the concept of color. Step 3: The missing shade of blue. Hume himself puts forward an exception to the copy principle, however. Someone who had never before seen a certain shade of blue would be able to conceive of it were they showed a list of all the other shades of blue, with the one they had not seen missing. The idea of that shade of blue would then not have been copied from an impression. Hume himself suggests this example is not significant, but arguably it is.Step 4: To defend Hume, one could claim ‘shades’ of blue are really complex ideas – mixtures of the simple ideas of blue, black and white. In that case, the missing shade of blue is conceived by the imagination in the same way as a golden mountain is conceived by joining the simple idea of gold and complex idea of mountain. Step 5: Philosophers disagree about how to break down complex ideas like knowledge, justice & beauty into simple ideas however. Either that is because the ideas and the method of acquisition of them are so complex or it’s that Hume’s theory is wrong.Plato’s argument for innate mathematical concepts in the MenoStep 1: Socrates draws a square with a diamond inside on the ground in front of a slave boy who has had no mathematical teaching. Socrates then draws a diamond inside the square. The slave boy is able to explain, or correct himself when making a mistake, that the sides of the 8ft square are equal to the length of the diagonal of a square that is 4 square feet.Since the slave boy had no mathematical education, Socrates concludes he must have been born with the knowledge. He then argues that the only way to make sense of how that knowledge got there is if humans had a previous existence. Plato thinks that previous existence is the world of forms, where our souls existed before becoming trapped in this world of appearances. Step 2: An empiricist could respond that we gain the concepts of number and shape from experience and then gain mathematical knowledge when analysing those concepts. The slave boy may not have had any mathematical training, but he had seen shapes of objects in his life – thereby gaining concepts of shape and geometry. The knowledge is therefore gained via analytic a priori reasoning about concepts gained from experience. Step 3: The empiricist in step 2 is assuming that mathematical truths are analytic. If that were the case we could never ‘discover’ new mathematical knowledge, it would be merely worked out on the basis of mathematical concepts we knew already. A person can know two numbers and know what multiplication is, yet not know what the two numbers multiplied together are. Yet if mathematics were analytic, they should know it just as someone who knows what a bachelor is knows that it is an unmarried man. Step 4: The empiricist could reply that mathematics is simply more complicated conceptually than the idea of a bachelor. It takes reasoning to grasp the full meaning of the concepts, but it isn’t discovering anything additional to what was already contained within those concepts. Descartes – Trademark argument, based on the ‘causal adequacy principle’ which states that there must be as much reality in the cause as there is in the effect. Which sort of means that something can’t make something greater than itself.Descartes said we have an idea of a perfect God in our mind. However, we are not perfect enough to have created that idea, therefore only God could have put that idea there and made it innate in us. The idea of God is like a ‘trademark’.This is both an argument for the existence of God, and also for innate knowledge.There are examples of things that seem to violate the causal adequacy principle. E.g Evolution.Locke’s empiricism vs Leibniz’ rationalist innatismStep 1: Locke believed the mind was ‘tabula rasa’ at birth so there is no innate knowledge. If there were, such knowledge would be universally assented to. However, children and idiots do not know supposedly innate propositions such as ‘something cannot be and not be at the same time’ or ‘something cannot be black all over and white all over’ or ‘whatever is, is’. Locke also argued that even if there was something that was universally assented to, that wouldn’t necessarily make it innate. There could be some other explanation of how everyone came to know something other than it being innate. So universal assent is a necessary but insufficient criterion for innate knowledge.Step 2: Leibniz responded to Locke’s ‘children and idiots’ augment by claiming that people can have knowledge even if they can’t express it. We can tell by the way children and idiots nonetheless manage to act and behave in the world that they must ‘unconsciously’ adhere to such necessary truths as ‘something cannot be and not be at the same time’. Additionally, Leibniz argued that innate knowledge could require some sort of unlocking or triggering process by interaction with experience in order to be consciously known. Leibniz illustrated this with a block of veined marble where the veins happened to form the outline of a statue of Hercules. A stonemason would merely need to hit the block a little and then the statue would be revealed. The work of the stonemason is like experience and the statue is the innate knowledge. It might look like experience is causing the knowledge but really it is just activating the pre-existing innate knowledge. Leibniz thinks he can prove this knowledge could not have come from experience and must therefore have been innate by pointing out that propositions such as ‘something cannot be and not be at the same time’ are necessary, as they cannot fail to be true. We never experience anything necessary (must exist) – only contingent things (could exist or not exist). Therefore, our knowledge of necessary propositions must have been innate.Rationalism: Descartes’ Intuition & Deduction thesis The meaning of ‘intuition’ and ‘deduction’.Descartes thinks we can gain informative (synthetic) knowledge through a priori means by intuition and deduction. Intuition is when the rational mind apprehends the truth or falsity of something with immediacy, which means without any process of reasoning or inference. The mind simply ‘grasps’ the rational rules by which we intuit that 2+2 necessarily equals 4. Descartes claims there is a ‘natural light’ of the mind which makes us recognize certain truths because we cannot doubt them. Deduction is using premises to reach a conclusion the truth of which is entailed by the truth of the premises. If we can know that the premises are true and that the conclusion follows deductively from them then we can know the truth of the conclusion. Descartes’ notion of ‘clear and distinct ideas’.Descartes claims that the cogito is apprehended by his mind in a special way which he calls clarity and distinctness. A clear idea is ‘present and accessible to the attentive mind’ – analogous to perceiving something visual clearly with our eye. An idea is distinct when it is so sharply separated from all other ideas that every part of it is clear’. Descartes claims that since the Cogito is a clear and distinct idea which he knows to be true, then clarity and distinctness must ‘as a general rule’ be a sign of truth. The cogito as an example of a priori intuitionStep 1: Descartes’ points out that we cannot doubt our own existence since that presupposes that we exist in order to do the doubting. We can therefore see that our existence is a clear and distinct idea intuited a priori.Step 2: Descartes’ then however points out that while we can know that clear and distinct ideas are true when we are apprehending them, it’s surely possible that they become untrue when we are not, perhaps because of God or an evil demon deceiving us. Therefore he feels the need to prove that is not the case.Step 3: To do that, Descartes first attempts to prove the existence of God with his ontological argument and the trademark argument.Empiricist responses to the cogitoStep 1: Hume argues that we only experience constantly changing mental states, not an enduring mental substance which could be the ‘I’ of the cogito, so we cannot know that there must be an ‘I’ which thinks. Hume argues that we wrongly and confusedly think that similarity of our mental states over time entails personal identity over time.Step 2: Descartes’ replies so this kind of argument by claiming it is clear and distinct that thoughts require a thinker.Step 3: Arguably Descartes is just influenced by the common sense ordinary experience of attributing thoughts to thinkers, but if he was truly doubting everything then why not the supposed link between thoughts and thinkers also?Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God as an a priori deduction.Step 1: The trademark argument. Descartes argues that the ‘natural light’ yields the causal adequacy principle - that there must be as much reality in the cause as there is in its effect. Just as something cannot come from nothing, neither can what is more perfect come from what is less perfect.He argues we imperfect beings are causally inadequate to create the perfect concept of God, therefore God must exist as the only causally adequate explanation of our concept of God.Step 2: evolution seems to violate the causal adequacy principle since it is an example of there being less reality in the cause as there is in the effect. The cause – single celled organisms – is lesser than the effect – humans. Step 3: However, it’s not quite the case that single celled organisms gave rise to humans. It was a combination of single celled organisms plus their environment, which together over billions of years resulted in humans. Empiricist responses to the trademark argumentStep 1: Hume argues that the concept of God is not innate but can be created by our minds. We start by imagining finite human qualities like goodness and imagine what they were like without limit by abstractly negating finitude/imperfection to create the concept not-finite/not-perfect, which is the concept infinite/perfect. We then combine goodness and infinite/perfect to imagine God’s omnibenevolence, and so too with God’s other attributes.Step 2: Descartes responds to this kind of argument by claiming that we couldn’t recognize imperfection as imperfection without appreciating that it was a lack of something which made it lesser than a standard of perfection which we must therefore already have an idea of. Step 3: Arguably the origin of the concept of perfection is merely a subjective preference for order over chaos since that typically enables survival which we have evolved to desire. It’s hard to see what objective basis there could be for perfection, but in that case the concept of God is only subjectively perfect which would not then place any constraints on its causal adequacy. Descartes’ proof of the external world as an a priori deductionThe existence of physical objects in the external world.Descartes claims he has a clear and distinct idea of a physical object as something that has extension and is changeable.His perceptions of physical objects are involuntary and cannot therefore come from his mind over which he has voluntary control. These perceptions are caused either by an external world, God or I simply have a tendency to have false beliefs which I cannot correct.If God, then God is giving us perceptions which do not map onto reality which would make God a deceiver. God is perfect by definition and therefore not a deceiver, so he cannot be causing my perceptions nor allowing an evil demon to deceive me by causing them.If God exists and is not a deceiver, he cannot have created me with a tendency to have false beliefs which I cannot correct.According to Descartes’ other arguments, God exists.So by process of elimination, the cause of my perceptions of physical objects in an external world is the existence of physical objects in an external world.Empiricist responses to Descartes’ proof of the external world.Step 1: Hume’s fork holds that ‘all objects of human reason or inquiry’ are either ‘relations of ideas’ or matters of fact. Relations of ideas, including intuitive analytic knowledge such as mathematics, are not dependent on ‘what is anywhere existent in the universe’. Their truth is therefore established regardless of what the universe was like. It cannot be denied without contradiction, since there is no possibility of it changing to be false since it does not depend on anything which changes (the universe). Intuitions of the relations of ideas therefore can not be about the world.Matters of fact are dependent on what happens to in fact exist in the universe and can be denied without contradiction since whatever happens to exist might have happened not to exist, which our minds can imagine. Hume claims a priori intuition and deduction only provides us with analytic knowledge of the relations of ideas, not synthetic matters of fact. Step 2: Knowledge of maths is arguably about more than just our own concepts.Descartes assumes that his perceptions must have a cause, but Hume argues that this cannot be established a priori since the claim ‘everything has a cause’ can be denied without contradiction and is thus not analytically true.Relativism vs absolutismEthical Naturalism – is the view that goodness is something real in the world. Ethical language is meaningful as it describes some real property in the world. So ‘X is good’ is essentially the same type of statement in terms of how it is true as ‘X is made of wood’. It is made true by facts in the world. Utilitarianism claims that goodness = pleasure or happiness. Pleasure and happiness are natural properties (at least if you don’t believe in a non-natural soul). Meta-ethically, Utilitarianism is therefore a form of naturalism, moral realism and cognitivism.The linguistic claims of Utilitarian naturalism are straightforwardly that ethical language is cognitivist as it functions no differently to expression of any other type of belief about reality. To describe the color of the table, I say ‘the table is brown’. This is an indicative sentence expressing a belief about reality. The ethical language ‘stealing from a bank is good’ is no different for the utilitarian naturalist. It is an indicative sentence and a proposition about reality which will be either true or false depending on whether that particular action of stealing leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number.Bentham’s Utilitarian naturalism: “Nature has placed us under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do … a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while”. Bentham’s argument is that it is our human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so that’s all there is for morality to be about. We just are the kind of thing which cannot help but find pleasure good and pain bad. Bentham claims we could try to pretend otherwise but cannot escape this nature. As this is a fact of our nature, it is therefore a fact that goodness = pleasure.Mill’s proof of utilitarianism attempted to prove that happiness was the one thing that people wanted for its own sake. He drew an analogy with sight, claiming that the only evidence for something being visible is that it is seen, and so the only evidence for something being desirable is that it is desired. The proof that happiness is desirable is therefore that it is desired. It follows for Mill that because he has proved that happiness is desirable, it therefore ought to be desired and so utilitarian naturalism is true.G. E. Moore argued that Mill commits the fallacy of equivocation here, which is when you use a word which has two meanings and fail to make it clear which meaning you intend in a way that damages your argument. ‘Visible’ does just mean ‘can be seen’ but to suggest it is analogous to ‘desirable’ is to equivocate as ‘Desirable’ could mean ‘capable of being desired’ but also ‘should be desired’. Mill has proved that people are capable of desiring happiness but not that happiness should be desired, so he has failed to show that goodness = happiness.Mill isn’t claiming absolute proof however. As an empiricist, Mill is looking for evidence. While it’s certainly the case that people can actually desire what they should not desire, nonetheless if there is something that everyone desires i.e. happiness, then that is evidence which makes it reasonable to infer that happiness should be desired. Hume’s law criticises naturalism. Hume said philosophers talk about the way things are and then jump with no apparent justification to a claim about the way things ought to be. Hume claimed this was a fallacy as is-statements do not entail ought-statements.?Hume argues that you could be aware of all the facts about a situation yet if you then pass a moral judgement, that clearly cannot have come from ‘the understanding’ nor be ‘the work of judgement’ but instead come from ‘the heart’ and is ‘not a speculative proposition’ but an ‘active feeling or sentiment’. This looks like an argument against realism but also against cognitivism and for non-cognitivism, specifically emotivism.To illustrate, take the example of abortion. Some argue that because a foetus develops brain activity at a certain time, it’s wrong to do abortion past that point. However, that inference has a hidden premise; that it’s wrong to kill something which has brain activity. It’s a fact that the foetus has brain activity, but that it’s wrong to kill something with brain activity does not seem like a fact nor derived from a fact. We might try and justify that further by suggesting that it’s wrong to kill human life or cause pain and so on. However, while it’s factual that there is such a thing as the ending of human life and the causing of pain, is it a fact that doing such things are wrong? We can easily imagine what sort of evidence establishes that ‘pain can be caused’ is a fact, but it’s not easy to see how to do that to establish that ‘it’s wrong to cause pain’ is a fact. Bentham does think that certain is-statements entail ought-statements but and gives an argument for that. He do not simply ‘leap’ from is to ought without justification, so as long as his argument works they could be considered to solve Hume’s is-ought gap.Divine command theory and Euthyphro’s dilemmaThe Euthyphro dilemma is found in Plato’s writings. A Dilemma is when there are two ways something could be but each way raises problems. The two ways are called horns. The Euthyphro dilemma is summarised by modern philosophers as the question of whether what’s good is what God commands or whether God commands what is already intrinsically good. In other words, what makes good, good? The first horn Is it that God makes/commands/wills it to be so, the second horn is that good is good due to its intrinsic nature, independent of God’s commands.The first horn leads to the issue of arbitrariness.The second horn leads to a conflict with God’s omnipotence. Aquinas - God has an eternal and perfect nature and therefore cannot change his mind.However: This does not solve the arbitrariness problem AND: what caused God’s nature to pick out the things he commands to be good, as good? What is the connection between God’s perfection and picking murder to be wrong? If it’s arbitrary, then arguably it’s inconsequential and so how could it be a change which could result in God becoming imperfect?The Nature of BeliefStrong rationalism vs fideismPascal’s wagerNatural theology is the idea that knowledge of God can be gained from reasoning about the natural world. Since God created the world, knowledge about him can be gained from studying it. This results in knowledge based on reason.Revealed theology is the idea that knowledge of God can be gained from God’s revelations to us e.g in Jesus and the Bible. John 14:9, Jesus said “Whoever has seen me has seen the father”. This results in revealed knowledge which is based on faith that what is received is from God. The limitations of human reason due to sin and the FallCalvin was influenced by Augustine’s views on the fall, claiming it introduced suffering into the world and corrupted human nature. The garden of Eden is God’s intended design for the world as a paradise. The suffering brought into the world by the fall therefore disfigures the world to an extent, which makes it difficult for natural theology to reveal God since his original design is now mixed with disfiguring corruption.Arguably we can tell which parts of the world are bad and so the result of the fall e.g natural disasters and which are good and therefore God’s original design e.g the beauty of nature.Brunner argued that there is no Biblical support for the view that the fall destroyed the sign of God God in his creation. He suggests instead however that we still cannot know God through nature directly, because our sin corrupts our mind. In Genesis, the fallen world is described as imperfect compared to Eden, since Adam has to ‘toil’ the land for food. So arguably it does suggest that it is less of a reflection of God.Arguably that is an insufficient change to reach Augustine’s conclusion. Having to toil the land for food does not mean our reason cannot access God’s existence through his creation.However, arguably the garden of Eden being a perfect and a bountiful existence better allows reason to know a God created it compared to our fallen world of suffering.Calvin argued that the fall corrupted the natural world which made it limited for revealing God and achieving salvation.Natural Theology contains a little truth because the fall did not result in total corruption of the world. Calvin was influenced by Paul who states that natural theology yields a “small savour of [God’s] divinity, so that [people] could not claim ignorance in excuse of their impiety” (Romans 1:20)For Calvin this is the only purpose of natural theology. It prevents people from being completely ignorant. They should then turn to the Bible, since Calvin thought knowledge of God is not simply a matter of knowing that God exists, it occurs when “we understand … what is conducive to his glory”. This means we only truly know God when we know how to worship and act morally, but natural theology cannot achieve that knowledge. Calvin thought that Jesus was God revealing himself. The Bible is a record of that revelation. Calvin claimed it “came down from heaven, as though we heard God speaking from his own mouth”.Calvin argued that people should see their knowledge as nothing more than a passive reception of the revelation of the Bible.What about the inconsistencies of the bible and the multiple interpretations possible to make of it?Calvin thought that humans are unable to know God sufficiently for the purposes of achieving salvation through natural theology. We therefore require Jesus for that. Dawkins argues faith is an “excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence”. He regards it as harmful because it makes people lazy in their thinking. He suggests belief in God is similar to belief in the tooth fairy. “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps of, the lack of evidence” - DawkinsDonovan has a different view of faith however: “Faith … is not … assent to a set of dogmas without sufficient evidence. It is the basic intuitive awareness of God experienced as actively approaching humanity and seeking the human response of acknowledgement and trust” – Peter Donovanpropositional vs non-propositionalSome Evangelical and Baptist denominations hold the stricter view that the bible doesn’t require interpretation as it is clear to the rational reader and can itself be sufficient to be the final authority of Christian doctrine. This is propositional revelation, involving God revealing things which are propositional in format such as beliefs, commandments and teachings.Contradictions in the bible. Similar events are told differently. In Mark, Jesus goes to his death in deep agony. In Luke, Jesus is not presented as being in agony at all. In the sermon on the Mount, Jesus seems to contradict Old Testament teachings (e.g about an eye for an eye). Leviticus states foods which can and can not be eaten, however Jesus states to the pharasees in Mark 7 that all foods are clean. The old testament laws on adultery and Jesus’ teachings differ. This suggests interpretation is required since different parts of the bible contradict. Furthermore, if the Bible requires no interpretation, why are there so many different gospels and why are they written differently?The factual claims of the bible contradict science. E.g the creation story vs the big bang & evolution. Arguably the bible does require interpretation, however. Our life experiences and thoughts will affect what lessons we take from the Bible, so it isn’t possible to read it ‘neutrally’. The human mind is not an empty vessel into which truth can be copied. Reason can access God’s revelation, according to Aquinas, along with the bible. However, Richard B Hays argues that reason is not objective nor neutral, as Aquinas thought. Instead, it is culturally influenced.Other Christians consider the bible an interpretation of God’s word. They regard it as metaphorical. It’s authors were only inspired by God, not dictated to. Also it must be read in its historical context. St Paul’s letters and teachings were meant for a specific audience. Teachings on women, slavery or violence can be seen as meant for a past audience and therefore outdated. This is non-propositional revelation, which involves gaining knowledge through non-cognitive feelings, emotions and attitudes which are produced through an experience of God either in himself of his creation such as nature. Non-propositional revelation is more personal than propositional revelation as they are felt by an individual in a unique relationship with God, rather than a book of propositions which can be read and understood by anybody.Leads to disagreements and disunity.Leads to cherry picking and selectivity biasWhich parts of the bible are literal, which are metaphorical?Which parts of the bible were meant for a previous audience, which are not?Sacred textsthe extent to which scripture is inspired by God and authoritative for believersTheonomous; Moral authority comes from God, usually sourced from his revelation in the Bible. Both religion and ethics have a shared source; God. This often involves suggesting the Church has no authority since God’s commands can be found in the Bible.Sola Scriptura is a form of theonomy involving Christians who think the bible alone is the source of Christian moral principles. This is typically a protestant view since Luther thought the Catholic Church was corrupt and had deviated from God’s revelation in the Bible for their own political earthly agenda. It follows that a return to the Bible was the method for placing God at the centre of religion and ethics again. The role of the Church for protestant reformers was merely to preach and interpret the Bible. The Bible is thought to derive its authority from its discernible excellence as a text and the religious experience of the holy spirits’ engagement with the human soul through it. Jesus said “the Holy Spirit, whom the father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” John 14:26-27. The Bible says that ‘Ru-ach’ – God’s breath, was breathed into the authors of the bible – directly inspiring them. 2 Timothy 3:16. ‘all scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking correcting and training in righteousness’The human writers of the bible didn’t author it themselves but were spoken through by God. ‘Then the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “I have put my words in your mouth”’ – Jeremiah 1.9.Sola scriptura is not in the Bible. These quotes suggest that the Bible should be a source of Christian moral principles, but they do not claim it is the only source nor speak against other sources. It is self-contradictory to believe that all religious knowledge should come from sola scriptura when sola scriptura itself cannot be derived from scripture.Sola scriptura is not the view that all knowledge must come from scripture. The knowledge that the bible is the only adequate source of principles is arguably separate from the question of what those moral principles themselves are. The corruption of the Catholic Church could be seen as the argument for sola scriptura. Furthermore, while the corruption of the Catholic Church proves its inadequacy, the excellence of the biblical texts could be the basis on which they are accepted as authoritative. The books in the New Testament were not decided on until the 4th century by Catholic clergy. This suggests that the Bible should not be the only source since it grew out of the church and therefore if it is authoritative, the Church is also. It also seems strange for the protestants to trust those Catholics in their choice of what to include in the Bible. Protestants could respond that the holy spirit influenced the creation and choosing of the Bible, thus ensuring its validity. Catholics could respond that the holy spirit guides their magisterium too.Anglicanism holds to prima scriptura, indicating the bible is primary but that there are other secondary sources of authority such as tradition, reason and experience. Catholics hold that tradition and the Bible are equal, arguably Anglicanism overcomes the sola scriptura criticisms by not totally getting rid of tradition, but also the critique of tradition that the protestant reformers made, by not allowing it to be equal to the Bible. This would make heteronomy of the Anglican variety correct.The Bible contains a tacit endorsement of slavery.Fletcher rejected the theonomous sola scriptura of the protestant reformers. He points out the competing interpretations of the Sermon on the mount, suggesting that the Bible alone cannot give you clear enough guidance on how to act.Fletcher also argued that taking the bible literally is no solution, suggesting the “headache” of interpreting what the bible meant is far less trouble compared to trying to live as a literalist. Fletcher gives the example of ‘do not resist one who is evil’ as an example.Fletcher argues that the Bible is not a ‘rules book’ but an ‘editorial collection of scattered sayings, such as the Sermon on the Mount’ which at most offers us ‘some paradigms or suggestions’. Surely Fletcher’s critique of the Bible as a source of ethics applies to Fletcher’s own inference of the importance of Agape from what Jesus said was the ‘greatest’ commandment – to love your neighbour as yourself. Isn’t situation ethics just Fletcher’s interpretation of the Bible, no better than protestant sola scriptura according to his own logic?If Agape is all someone needs for ethics, then why did Jesus bother making any other ethical commands?ConscienceAugustine and Aquinas on the nature and source of the conscience; psychological understandings of the conscience; Butler and Freud. Religious views on conscienceAugustine had perhaps the simplest view, which is that the conscience is simply the voice of God speaking to us, telling us what is right and wrong. Psalm 51 'create in me a clean heart o god and put a new and right spirit within me'. Augustine claimed conscience isn't enough to make one virtuous, we also need God's grace. The ethical role of conscience for Augustine is therefore that it is a direct line to an?objectively true ethics.Criticism: Different people's consciences tell them different things. Every Nazi soldier had 'God on our side' written on their belt buckle. However, Augustine could reply that God telling different people different things might be some part of his plan, which we simply can't understand.Christians like William Wilberforce disagreed with the privileging of conscience over the bible which they believed should be the primary source of ethics. However, Augustine could reply that if conscience really is the voice of God, surely it should have primacy over anything else? However, what about the situations when the conscience goes directly against the teachings of the church or bible? Couldn't we sometimes be mistaken or deluded about what we think our conscience is telling us? E.g mental illness, brain hallucinations, fasting, drugs, alcohol, the devil.Newman also thought that conscience is?an innate sense in us created by God which directs us to the divine law and is essentially manifesting?the voice of God in us, 'when a person follows the conscience he is ... following the divine law .. conscience is a messenger of God and it is God speaking to us when we feel this intuitive moral knowledge'. So the conscience is ethically the most important thing as it is a direct line to the objective divine law.Newman didn't think Conscience should simply override church teachings if it conflicted - we have?to think about it and try to figure it out. Though arguably he does a bit of a cop out to dealing with this inconsistency by saying we should just pray for the resolution.The same criticism that different people have different conscience applies to Newman as it did to Augustine.Butler argued that the conscience was what most distinguished humans from animals. 'There is a principle of reflection in men by which we distinguish between approval and disprove of their own action ... this principle in man is conscience'. Butler thinks the conscience works unconsciously 'magisterially exerts itself without being consulted' Arguably it is a strength that it works unconsciously because it means it can't be corrupted by human reason or moral failings/temptations.?Butler saw nature as hierarchical with nature at the top - at base are our drives for food, above this are the drives for self-love (wanting well-being of self) and benevolence (wanting the well-being of others). Higher than these linked to the conscience is the principle of reflection which makes us approve or disapprove our actions - this was given to us by God, thereby making its judgements authorative. So the conscience is a God given guide to decision making. It must be obeyed if a person is to be truly happy. The conscience cannot give us a direct clear line to absolute ethical truth however since it's not exactly the voice of God in us - it is merely a guide God gave us, which we must process and think about in order to apply.?Butler argued that people have the unfortunate ability to corrupt their what they take from the guidance of their conscience, convincing themselves something is right when really it's wrong. Butler thought that this corruption of the conscience was actually morally worse than the consequences of the action they sought to justify. So if you murder someone, it was the corruption of your conscience by which you sought to justify your action which was worse than the act itself.Arguably the strength of Butler's view over Augustine and Newman was that he can't be criticized for different people's consciences telling them different things, since that could be due to corruption or different reasoning about the guide of conscience.?Criticism of Butler:Arguably moral decision making is very different from simply getting an intuition about a simply moral decision. Many moral situations are simply difficult.Butler could respond because he says the conscience is a just a guide which we need to apply and interpret. Newman could try to reply because he says the conscience could be corrupted however this response seems weak as moral dilemmas don’t occur due to people corrupting what their conscience tells them, they occur when there are genuinely good arguments to be made on both sides.Philosophers like Kant would disagree with Butler that virtuous people can necessarily achieve happiness in this world.How do we really know when a conscience has been corrupted? Isn't that all down to subjective interpretation? Because Butler makes room for reason, thinking things through and so on, he allows human fallibility to enter the process, which means things will sometimes go wrong. While Aquinas simply accepts that and states the conscience should nonetheless still be followed, Butler positively argues that we shouldn't and are wrong when we corrupt our conscience, but this then assumes we can determine when that is happening.?Aquinas - believes all humans have a 'tendency to do good and avoid evil - the synderesis rule. Aquinas believed the conscience was an innate faculty given to us by God. We then develop this faculty throughout our life through synderesis and conscientia. Synderesis is when we fill the faculty or template of our conscience with moral experience by the repeated use of 'right action'.?Conscientia is the application of this moral repertoire to new moral situations in the form of judgements. Aquinas said that reason plays a role in all stages of this process. Because human reason is fallible, the conscience thereby becomes fallible. We could be mistaken for example when we don't know a moral rule (mistake in synderesis)?or when we?don't?know that a general rule applies to a certain situation (mistake in conscientia). While Aquinas acknowledged that conscience can be mistaken through normal human reason errors, it could also be deliberately corrupted.Aquinas says conscience is reasoning used correctly to see what God sees as good, it is not just a voice inside us.Criticism: Copleston argues that Aquinas is wrong to think conscience only involves reason - it also involves emotion. If so, this could potentially disrupt the ethical importance Aquinas placed on it. While reason can go wrong and therefore be corrected, if it is emotion that guides the conscience, it's hard to see how that could be corrected or even accurately described as correct or incorrect.Is it really true that there is a human nature which seeks to do good and avoid evil? What about violence embracing cultures like Nazism?Aquinas could respond that even in those cases, the problem is that errors in reasoning have led their good human nature astray. Nazi’s truly believed in ancient Nordic blood myths which they thought established their racial superiority, for example. But couldn’t we respond again that perhaps evil people actually seek these ideologies out because it gives them an excuse to be evil. In that case, they weren’t innately good people confused by an incorrect ideology, they were innately evil people who invented or cleaved to an ideology that gave that evil expression.Psychological views on the conscienceFreud thought the conscience was just the result of psychological forces that science could understand. Freud believed the mind was divided into the Id (our unconscious animalistic desires), Ego (Our conscious decision-making self) and the Super Ego (the part of us that stores the values we introjected ((unconsciously adopted)) from authority figures during childhood and is the source of our moral feelings). When a desire bubbles up from the unconscious Id into our conscious Ego, we become aware of wanting to act on it, but our Super Ego then tells us whether the values of our society allow it. If so, we can act on it. If not, we have been conditioned to repress that desire, which Freud thought responsible for many mental problems. The ethical implications is that conscience is not the voice of God in us, it is just what our society wants from us. Our society might be good or bad, therefore our conscience is not the best guide if Freud is right. Furthermore there might not even be a ‘good or bad’, if morality is merely the conditioning of societies on its members.The Strength of Freud is that he attempts to be an empirical scientist, meaning he bases his views on evidence and reason rather than faith. However, Freud has been criticised by contemporary psychologists for not being empirical enough. Karl Popper criticised Freud’s theory for being ‘unfalsifiable’ as it could not say what would prove it wrong. This means it is not true empiricism.Piaget was a contemporary psychologist who developed better empirical methods of experiment than Freud. He studied the development of children and argued that there occurs a fundamental shift in the nature of ‘conscience’. Before the age of 11 children have what he called heteronomous morality. This means they merely associate actions as bad because of the influence of their authority figures like parents. For example, an 8 year old child dangerously runs into a road and their parent yells at them. The child will learn not to do that again, but not because they have cognitively understood that running into the road will cause them injury or death which would be a bad thing, but because they merely associate the action of running into the road with the loud scary noise of their parents occurring. After 11 year old however, Piaget argued that the autonomous morality develops in children, where they can begin to have abstract cognitive moral beliefs about how one ought to act and why.If Piaget is correct and the conscience develops over time, this seems to argue against the possibility of it being the voice of God in us, since God’s commands are eternal and unchanging – they do not develop over time. Aquinas and butler’s theories might be safe from this criticism however, since their theory of conscience involve its development over time.Augustine and Newman could potentially respond by arguing that God speaks to young children differently than older ones, though this seems a bit far fetched. It also seems to misunderstand Piaget’s view. The Heteronomous morality is not merely a voice ‘in a different way’, but really a non-cognitive purely associative part of the mind. The strength of Piaget is that his work is based on empirical evidence, not faith.Free Will? The debate between libertarianism, hard determinism and soft determinism about whether the universe is determined and whether humans are free; theological determinism; Calvin.DeterminismHard/Philosophical determinism. Barron D’Holbach was one of the first Atheists and observed that if we are not created by God and don’t have a soul, we are just physical things like any other and therefore follow the same laws of cause and effect. Every event is caused by previous events, including human action. If we keep tracing the cause of our action back in time, eventually we will get to before we were born, and could ultimately go all the way back to the big bang. We were not responsible for the big bang, nor our birth, but therefore we cannot be responsible for our actions either. So there is no such thing as free will.But it still feels like we have free will! John Locke illustrated that feeling was an illusion by asking us to imagine a man in a locked room who wakes up, unaware it is locked, and ‘chooses’ to stay in the room. He felt like he made a choice, when actually reality was such that no choice was in fact available to him. Locke argues this could be the case for every human action. We simply are unable to directly perceive all the causes and effects that determined our action, which leaves us with the illusion that we were not determined, when really we were. Honderich argued that determinism being true meant we have no moral responsibility. Quantum mechanics tells us that some things happen without a cause. Therefore determinism seems false. However, if our actions happen because of random quantum mechanics, that hardly seems a better basis for free will than determinism. Honderich responds to this criticism by arguing that the structures of the brain might be large enough that the laws of quantum mechanics (which only applies to the very small atomic level) might not actually apply to them nor their function. If this is the case, while determinism might not be true at the Quantum level, it could still be true at the macro level.Theological determinism – Predestination – some theologians like Calvin argued that humans lack free will because God has set out a plan for our lives, including whether we will go to heaven. This agrees with determinism but argues it’s God’s divine power and will that determines us, not the mechanical forces of cause and effect.Pre-destinationists argue mankind is naturally sinful and can only choose to be sinful - thereby not really having a full choice. St Paul says 'and those he predestined, he also called, he also put right with himself; those he put right with himself, he also glorified' - romansAugustine argued people need the help of God's grace to do good. God gives us this regardless of our merit, just by his mercy and goodness. Augustine compared God to a potter shaping clay - 'The potter has authority over the clay from the same lump to make one vessel for honour and another for contempt'Calvin also believed in predestination - argued man is a complete sinner who is incapable of coming to God and can only choose to reject God - thereby not having a full choice.Predestination must therefore occur or all would go to hell. Calvin said God 'ordains eternal life for some and eternal damnation for others'Arguably this seems to counter Gods omnibenolance because he's essentially raising lambs for the slaughterIs ?our inability to do evil really a limitation on our free will though? Calvin argues that it's part of our sinful nature that we can't do good, only evil. But it's also part of our nature that we can't fly without the ?aid of technology - we don't have wings. Yet we don't view it as a constraint on our free will in that case, so maybe we shouldn't regard our lack of grace as a constraint on our free will either. We can inedeed only choose from a limited range of actions - evil ones - but it's a choice nonetheless, just like we can also only choose to walk, run or crawl, not fly.Psychological determinism. Pavlov rang a bell whenever he fed his dogs. After a while, he found that he could ring the bell and the dogs would start to salivate even before he fed them. The dogs had associated the bell with food. This is called classical conditioning – when a biological function is associated with something. This was developed by Skinner who was a behaviourist. He invented operant conditioning, which involves conditioning behaviour by the giving of rewards. This could potentially be used to condition anyone into any particular behaviour the conditioner wanted. Skinner argued that all humans are already conditioned by their society which gave them a certain upbringing. We don’t have free will because our choices are the result of our upbringing, which we didn’t choose.Arguably conditioning and our upbringing only creates influence, rather than completely determining our action. It might give us a strong temptation or desire to behave in a certain way, however we still have the ability to resist this influence and choose otherwise. In response to this, the behaviourist could argue that this ability to choose otherwise could also have been conditioned by other, less obvious factors.Darrow was a lawyer who used psychological determinism as an argument in the case of two boys Leopold and Loeb, who had committed murder. Darrow argued the boys were a product of their upbringing, which they did not choose, and therefore should be considered less responsible. Their sentence was reduced from the death penalty to life imprisonment. Wouldn’t it be disastrous for our society if we judged criminals not responsible if they had a bad upbringing?Biological determinism. Our genes play a role in determining what we are like, not just for physical characteristics but mental ones too. Therefore they could have an impact on choice and potentially undermine free will. For example, the MAOA gene, sometimes called the ‘Warrior gene’ disposes people to violent behaviour. It exists in about 30% of the population, however the gene requires ‘activating’ by traumatic experiences, and so doesn’t affect many of those who carry it. If someone with an activated warrior gene commits a violent crime, should we therefore consider them less morally responsible, since they couldn’t have been responsible for having that gene?However can’t we still resist our biological impulses? Soft Determinism – also called compatibilism - is the view that free will and determinism are compatible (can both be true). Hume distinguishes between internal causes (causes that are internal to a person – their beliefs, desires, motivations, intentions) and external causes (causes that are external to a person – someone forcing them to do something). Hume noticed that we only hold people responsible for actions that result from our internal causes. So Hume defined free will as being determined by your internal causes not external causes. Even though our internal causes are just as determined as our external causes, Hume thinks this definition of free will nonetheless gives us the conception of moral responsibility we want.Arguably this is not the definition of free will people want. They want to actually be the uncaused cause of their actions, and to have the ability to have done otherwise. Does this picture of moral responsibility even work? How can we be morally responsible for something we couldn’t have helped doing? Is the distinction between internal and external causes meaningful? Don’t internal causes ultimately trace back, if we go far enough, to before we were born, and therefore to external causes? Psychological determinism would argue that our internal causes are the direct result of conditioning external causes, which also questions the validity of Hume’s conception of moral responsibility.LibertarianismWe feel like we have free will, therefore we do. When deliberating over a choice, it really feels like we could choose either path. This would not be if one path was really closed.Peter Van Inwagen argued that it would be impossible for someone who truly doesn’t believe in free will to decide which action to do. One cannot decide whether to do action A or B unless one believes that both A and B are possible to do. So in a rational sense, everyone is committed to the belief that there is free will simply because they perform actions. Those who then also hold a belief that free does not exist therefore hold inconsistent beliefs.C.S Lewis argued that if the universe were proven underterministic, this could make room for free will.What we feel to be true isn’t necessarily true though.. ................
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