We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge University Press, 2001]. I’ll pass over the issues of defining ‘facts’ or ‘values’ or ‘proof’ and go directly to an explanation of how it is that we do, in fact, draw values from a factual world. I’ve actually written to this issue, in a general sense, in a recent article: Intentionality as the Guide to Philosophical Thinking where I discussed a quote of Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps reading into it too much, but I think not. He said:
I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton]
I understood him to say that truth is found, and a ‘true’ mind is formed, as an honestly and constantly lived response to reality as we can best know it. Such an intensely lived response will reshape our thoughts and minds. It will form our moral characters.
In my writings, I’ve been developing an understanding of created being, a subject to which I’ve recently returned as I’m trying to develop an understanding of moral and social and political aspects of human life. For now, I’ll just refer the reader to a recent article where I very roughly summarized my current understanding of created being: Freedom and Structure in Human Life — A Project for More Than One Lifetime. My understanding of created being can perhaps be more readily understood by some readers if they approach through my parallel understanding of the human mind and how it works. Early in my blogging career, I wrote two series of articles on this topic. These are the initial articles in each of those series:
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What is Mind: Part 1. The Imagination that Can Be All and followup articles; and
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A Review of “Adaptive Thinking, Part I” and its followups.
The process of shaping the mind in response to Creation ensures that we gain values which are found in Creation in its entirety, including the world of the resurrected as well as this world. Creation is the totality of created being and includes not only created being but also various levels of abstract being going right back to the thoughts God manifested as the basic, or raw, stuff of this Creation. The concrete values proper for men, flesh-and-blood creatures that we are, can be drawn from the narrative which is this concrete world in its movement towards an unknown future, but we can rise to higher moral levels by proper formation and use of our minds. This doesn’t mean we transcend Creation but rather that we can begin to understand the purposes, let us even say the values, God intends for His created works.
Movement. Evolution of species or classes. Development of individual entities.
Our moral instincts aren’t a direct vision of some transcendental realm of truths. They come first from behaviors and attitudes which evolved in the human genetic line over millions of years. In fact, that process of evolution of moral nature started in pre-human lines of social mammals and, to some extent, in still earlier lines of living creatures.
At some time, our moral characters came into a tighter and more conscious state, partly because of a useful error in human thought. Once our ancestors had ascended, or descended as Darwin would have said, to a greater self-awareness, they concluded that our moral behavior is under direct, immediate control of those aware selves. In fact, we are creatures of moral action and it’s been shown that, at least for certain easily measured actions, we start to act before the more conscious, higher regions of our brain show any sign of activity. I’ve written of this issue before and written a little about its practical effects, though arguably R.L. Stevenson spoke more graphically in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde about the dangers of the illusion that we can directly control our ‘inner selves’. In fact, true values are useful as guides to human animals in strengthening their moral characters but self-aware thinking plays a role by shaping our selves so that we act properly in the future, not by turning us into some sort of creature which can transcend depravity by heroic acts of free-will. Values, moral abstractions in general, are necessary for the conscious shaping of our selves or our children, but our moral character is in that behavior, it is realized in our embodied selves and our actions. It’s not just our ‘good’ feelings.
In my effort to communicate a view at odds with most views of human moral nature. allow me to repeat that there are two sets of processes which have formed the human mind, including its moral aspects:
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We are born with certain tendencies toward behaviors and attitudes which are our ‘moral instincts’. These are the results of selection processes working over many thousands of years upon particular genetic lines of highly social creatures with other characteristics such as an opportunistic attitude.
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We are shaped as individuals as we respond actively to our environments. If there’s a harsh side to my views on human nature, it’s the implication that passive human animals never develop towards the state of human personhood.
These two processes exist at the concrete level of created being and the events which occur in the narrative which is this world. The second process, formation of the human mind, also exists at more abstract levels of created being. The entire process of understanding our own moral natures starts from awareness of the factual aspects of our own physical nature and continues when we begin to deal with those factual aspects through our intellectual faculties, that is, when we begin to draw abstractions from our concrete moral natures.
We place a high value on human life because we evolved as human beings in human societies, even though those societies might have been often no more than families. We have instincts against killing other human beings and most men even have great trouble killing another man, face-to-face, when it seems morally allowable. A humbling fact, which emphasizes the animal foundations of human moral nature, is that wolves seem to have stronger instincts than human beings against killing other members of their own species. A wolf will place higher value upon the life of another wolf than a man will place upon the life of another man. Human beings have developed higher moral principles, absolute principles, despite starting from a lower moral level of concrete behavior than wolves, in some respects.
In this brief survey, I’ll also mention a problem which arises in the Gospels of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth imposed some very difficult demands upon us, particularly His demands in the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not clear why creatures in a world of Darwinian processes should love their enemies and not clear how to actually shape ourselves or our children to the higher demands of Christ, but we could — in principle — understand these matters. Some would say we should simply obey Christ but He called us to imitate Him, even to be perfect as God is, and didn’t call us to simple, mindless obedience.
As St. Thomas Aquinas told us:
[J]ust as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can reach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made… (Page 17 of St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on 1 Corinthians as published in pdf form at the web-site of Ave Maria University.)
By understanding how the Creator worked, we come to understand the thoughts He manifested in Creation. Within those divine thoughts, are what we call values, and we can make those thoughts our own by proper exploration of empirical reality and proper active response to it. Values can come from facts because the Creator chose the facts which are manifested in this Creation, including those facts which deal with the evolution of moral species and the development of moral individuals. We can even say that we can find all our thoughts and values in Creation, not because of any materialistic reductionism or any other exclusion of God. God, as Creator, works yet within Creation, shaping being and telling the stories which are this world and the world of the resurrected. If we can understand the story which is our world, we can understand all values God would have us hold.