An Interesting Discussion

I'm currently studying a minor sequence in philosophy at university, and one of my current subjects (one week from completion, I might add) is on the topic of ethics (it's styled as an introduction to ethics, being a first year course). As a part of this course, we have a weekly hour of discussion in our tutorial group about the previous week's lectures. Naturally, such an open-ended discussion did not always conform to this expectation - on better days we would stray on to more recent lectures, on worse days we would talk about other philosophical areas of study such as metaphysics, and on a few occasions I found myself in a discussion (if it can be called that) which consisted of little more than a handful of forced comments on the topic at hand followed by an inane conversation about the latest developments in so-and-so's social life.

Now, as I mentioned, there were good days, and a couple of those were real crackers. The most recent of these saw myself and "the usuals" whom I normally sat with talking about that week's lectures, which were on abortion and infanticide. Out of the first awkward comments eventually came one person with an especially strong position; he was quite firmly against abortion, and he was happy to try and defend that position, a position he found at odds with the university's "very left-wing" philosophy department, which he noted was sadly like that of Melbourne and unlike that of several universities in the United States. If you had not guessed already, yes, it turns out he is a Christian, and I would guess something of a more conservative one at that. However, on this day and at this time, I didn't know any of that. All I knew was he was against abortion, and he had some reasons.

Now, I believe that if we're going to debate right and wrong, we should see all acts as morally acceptable until shown to be wrong. That's not to be taken as some overarching principle, more a guideline for tolerable behaviour. Some things I should think are prima facie wrong, and so would not enjoy much time in being considered acceptable (that's not to say that they were once fine and now are not, only that they were once seen as fine). My point here is that the burden of proof should lie with he who wants to say an action is wrong, not with who wants to say an action is right. This is just an opinion here, and I'll not offer justification for it (not any time soon, certainly) but since it really only applies to debates I don't see the need. I personally think it's a reasonable position to take. Had I been of lucid enough mind to recall this, I might have pressed this certain gentleman on his claim that by refuting arguments for abortion he has shown abortion is wrong - he would need to offer some sort of positive argument for his case.

Alas, I did not, and so our miniature debate, adjudicated by my friend Tyson, was less about abortion and more about this fellow's objections to Judith Jarvis Thomson's famous Violinist analogy. He seemed to be of the opinion (one that was never stated outright I should note) that because her analogy was invalid, his position was right. Clearly logically this does not follow, but I did not press him, as I mentioned, because I was perhaps too preoccupied with the debate we were having at the time. Now, I don't support Thomson necessarily, I find her ideas interesting but from as a virtue ethicist I'm not convinced by them. To paraphrase my tutor's comments on Singer (my tutor also being virtue-inclined), we're not even on the same wavelength.

I'll not describe our little argument in any detail because not only was it frustrating to participate in, the recollection surely capable of driving me to tears, the precise nature of his arguments are not the primary topic of this post. He had four points, three of which we properly debated. The final was not resolved in time, but I would say that with some assistance from my tutor (by the end I was exhausted) I had shown that at least two of them were severely flawed if not entirely refuted. But again, this is unimportant. After we touched on three of his Violinist counter-arguments, we got slightly sidetracked (as we are wont to do in these tutorials) and began talking about ethical perspectives - I demanded that he provide some justification other than 'most people would agree' or, if he didn't want to go into depth, his guarantee that he at least had some other justification, a demand which he refused. He then turned on me, and demanded I provide justifications for my beliefs. This was something of a non-sequitur, as I was not defending my own position but someone else's, and I let him know as much, along with protests that my own position was complicated.

Like a fool, however, the more he pressed, the more I relinquished and gave him the two-minute summary of the entirety of virtue ethical theory, something he was less than convinced by. He grilled me about details, extrapolating from my summary, ventured into meta-ethics, and generally caught me, tired and unprepared, by surprise. This was relieved by a rare interjection from one of the others in the group, who turned his questioning back on to him. His response, which is the main point of this topic, was a moment which Tyson later remarked to me as being a "dumbpiphany" (a reference to this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic (a webcomic we both enjoy)) and it started with the phrase, "Well, I'm coming from a Christian perspective, so...".

He didn't say much of substance after that, so I imagine his saying that was supposed to explain everything that needed to be explained. But what does that statement mean, exactly? Ok, he's a Christian, so what? So he's against abortion automatically? And everything he says is just an attempt to justify a belief he takes for granted as true? That doesn't seem very fair, but what else could it mean? He mentioned that Christians in philosophy courses aren't very open about it, as though this were a bad thing. Christians in science courses aren't very open about their Christianity either, because it's not relevant. Why should it be? There is a reason that ethics in analytic philosophy is secular, and that's because appeals to religion necessarily either reduce to arguments about God or tradition. Since the current consensus seems to be that we can never know if any god exists and it is something which must be taken on faith, that leaves the apologist in a difficult situation. Philosophy is about argument and rationality; if a rational person can't accept your position as being a reasonable one (though that person may not agree) then your position isn't worth consideration. I will tell you now that any argument which requires the person being persuaded or convinced to have faith that the argument is already valid is never ever going to be a good one, because it can only work on people who already agree with you. How can you expect anyone to take that position seriously?

Now, when I recounted this story to a friend of mine who was not present (telling it to someone who was would be quite boring for them, I imagine) his reaction to my shock at this supposed philosophical position was that I should be careful and hold in mind that he himself was Christian. I will tell you now that I have nothing against Christians in general, and I don't simply like ragging on a Christian philosophy student because I'm a big bad atheist and it gives me the jollies. The fact that he was Christian was irrelevant - the fact that he tried to use his religion to justify his stance was what shocked me, and the fact that he was blindly proud of what 'courage' it took to do that is what appalled me. It's not a question of religion and it's not even a question of attitude. The point is that, if look through the prism of reason vs. faith, that old dichotomy, modern philosophy falls firmly within the sphere of reason, and that is absolutely where it belongs. If "My god says so," or "My Holy Book instructs as such," become valid points of view ethically speaking, then literally any action could be considered completely justifiable. If so, then what is the point of ethics? If it is to be any good, it has to apply to more than one person or one group or one dogma; it must be able to apply to everyone.