Abstract
In this paper I do three things. Firstly, I defend the view that in his most familiar arguments about morality and the theological postulates, the arguments which appeal to the epistemological doctrines of the first Critique, Kant is as much of a fictionalist as anybody not working explicitly with that conceptual apparatus could be: his notion of faith as subjectively and not objectively grounded is precisely what fictionalists are concerned with in their talk of nondoxastic attitudes. Secondly, I reconstruct a logically distinct argument to a fictionalist conclusion which I argue Kant also gives us, this time an argument to the conclusion that it is a good thing if our commitment to the existence of God is nondoxastic. And finally, I argue that this argument is of continuing interest, to Kantians and non-Kantians alike, not only because it raises interesting questions about the relation of morality to belief in God (which go in the opposite direction to most discussions, which focus on whether and to what extent belief in God can be an aid to morality), but also because this ‘Moral Hazard Argument’ seems to be available to religious realists and non-realists alike, thus suggesting that religious fictionalism is not by any means just an interesting version of religious non-realism.
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Notes
See the swift rebuttals of Lange ’s (1866) suggestion in Schurman (Lange’s ’relegating the facts of moral and religious consciousness to a “world of fiction” is, apparently, ‘no philosophy’ but merely ‘sheer despair of philosophy’ (1881, p22)); of Vaihinger (1911) in Wood (1970, p. 148; cf. [1991, pp. 85–88); and of unnamed ‘fictionalists’ (presumably Vaihinger?) in White Beck (1960, p. 193fn).
But cf. Chignell’s (2007, pp. 350f; 357ff) very interesting suggestion about Kant’s notion of ‘theoretical belief’, which is relevantly similar to the Kantian notion of faith I will discuss below, and the possible application of that to the issue of noumenal affection, and thus the thing-in-itself. As I will explain in what follows, I take it that Kant’s ideas about faith (and the other varieties of assent on purely subjective grounds, of which theoretical belief is one) are what qualify him as a fictionalist, but Chignell does not mention fictionalism in his comments about the contemporary resonances of Kant’s views here, even though he does compare Kant to other authors who distinguish acceptance from belief. Chignell does not claim that Kant actually thought that the thing-in-itself is an object of theoretical belief, but rather that it would have made sense for him to do so.
This section summarises lengthy discussion in my (2012, Introduction, Part 1 and Chap. 5, §3).
It is also the sense employed by Joyce (2001, 2005), Kalderon (2005a), and some others. Note that it is not the same sense as that employed by Rosen (1990), Brock (2002) and others who appeal to some sort of according to... operator (to translate ‘there is a possible world in which there are talking donkeys’ into ‘according to modal realism there is a possible world in which there are talking donkeys’, for example) so as to make their target claims more acceptable. And it is not clear that the theses about attitudes that I will be interested in are appealing to the same ideas about metaphorical or fictional content as are appealed to by fictionalists such as Yablo (2005), Leng (2010), either.
Some writers about religious fictionalism (Le Poidevin (1996, p. 108; 2003, p. 275), Harrison (2010, p. 52)) say that fictionalism involves the thought that religious claims are not truth-apt, which is in stark contrast to what fictionalists about other domains, and several other religious fictionalists, say. I think that the idea that fictionalism involves the thought that the target claims are not truth-apt is due to conflating the properties of being truth-normed and of being truth-apt, or to unwarrantedly assuming an entailment from the former to the latter.
See Joyce (2005) for arguments to show that we should not reinterpret the meaning of ‘Sherlock Holmes was a detective’ in order to make it acceptable. Note that when I say our attitudes towards claims about Sherlock Holmes are not supposed to be sensitive to the truth, or to available evidence, I mean just that they are not supposed to be sensitive to the truth of or evidence for the specified claim; of course the acceptability conditions of the specified claim might appeal to some other fact or piece of evidence for some other claim, such a fact or claim about what a story says.
I argue against the need for or desirability of this assumption in my (2012, Chap. 1).
In addition to the citations in the previous footnote, see Wettstein (1997), Eshleman (2005, 2010). Also relevant is the work on nondoxastic faith in Pojman (1986), Alston (1996), Audi (2011), but it’s a feature of all these views that for nondoxastic faith to be reasonable or rational it must be at least possible (from the point of view of the person of faith) that there is a supernatural God, so whilst their models of faith are indeed nondoxastic, they offer at most an agnostic, rather than atheist, sort of fictionalism. I confine myself here to the fictionalist literature on faith in the analytic philosophical tradition, leaving aside a great deal of significant work on these issues in theology and other philosophical traditions. Note that I also leave aside naturalist reinterpretations of God-talk.
I argue this point with respect to fictionalism in general in my (2012).
The hedge here is intended to rule out, e.g., counting as a mathematical realist just in virtue of thinking it vacuously true that there is no prime number between 8 and 10 (because there are no prime numbers at all, because there are no numbers).
See my (2012, Introduction, §2) for a slightly fuller discussion of this sense of realism and its opposites, and how it relates to other uses of ‘realism’, particularly Dummett’s.
The ‘hermeneutic’/‘revolutionary’ terminology seems to come from Burgess (1983) who uses it to distinguish different types of nominalist theories in the philosophy of mathematics. It caught on far more with those writing about fictionalism than it did with those writing about other theories, though.
It should be obvious that ‘evaluative fictionalism’ is not fictionalism about evaluations, any more than ‘revolutionary fictionalism’ is fictionalism about revolutions. If this moniker is apt to confuse, I would welcome any better suggestions!
In particular I have in mind the fact that van Fraassen’s (1980) ‘constructive empiricism’ might best be described as the view that our acceptance of claims about unobservables in the context of science can permissibly be nondoxastic. (This is a particularly interesting suggestion in the (admittedly rather
anachronistic) light of his (2002) voluntarism about reasoning.) A fictionalist view which settles for a claim about the bare permissibility of nondoxastic acceptance—even if the idea is that permissibility is all that can be hoped for since there are only good reasons not to reason in certain ways, not good reasons in favour of reasoning in any particular ways—is not obviously accommodated by even the three-way taxonomy above, which classifies fictionalists as describing, highlighting what ought to be the case, or highlighting what is good. This is for pursuing elsewhere, though.
What Kant means by happiness is not entirely straightforward (see Hill 1999 for a good discussion), but it clearly has something to do with our satisfaction at achieving our ends.
In the interests of intellectual honesty here, I should point out that alas I do not read German. The point about the occurrences and translation of ‘glaube’ I am making is, though, readily apparent from the editorial material and secondary critical literature available in English.
For an excellent discussion of the relevant topics, see Chignell (2007).
In fact Kant recognises other forms of faith, aside from rational faith, though rational faith is always, for him, the most important sort. See (1793, Part III, Division 1, esp. §§V–VII) for a discussion of what he calls ‘ecclesiastical’ or ‘historical’ faith, which, whilst subordinate in important ways to rational faith, is necessary in light of ‘the natural need of all human beings to demand for even the highest concepts and grounds of reason something that the senses can hold on to, some confirmation from experience or the like, (a need which must also be seriously taken into account when the intention is to introduce a faith universally)’ (1793, 6:109). See also Kant (1798, 1st Part).
Note that this does not mean that I disagree as such with the view that for Kant ‘faith as much as knowledge is justified by reasons that are “valid for everyone”’ (Wood 1992, p. 401), at least so long as
that is understood as meaning that the type of reason which suffices for one person will be a type of reason which suffices for any person (namely being morally committed), which obviously does not mean that the particular reason one person has (their own moral commitment) is the same as the particular reason anybody else could have (for their reason, of the relevant type, would be their own moral commitment—each person’s moral commitment is, qua commitment, their own). To say precisely why such reasons do not count as evidence, but rather as some other sorts of grounds, would require a separate paper, so for now I take it for granted that they do not, and that a particular piece of evidence could, in principle, be a reason for anybody (the ‘in principle’ clause is important, because it might be that in order to count as a reason for belief, some enabling conditions (such as the possession of certain relevant concepts, perhaps) must be met).
‘[P]ure rational faith can never be transformed into knowledge by any natural data of reason and experience, because here the ground of holding true is merely subjective, namely a necessary need of reason (and as long as we are human beings it will always remain a need) to presuppose the existence of a highest being, but not to demonstrate it.’ (1786, 8:141)
I take it for granted that Kant is committed to some sort of semantic representationalism, the other conjunct of fictionalism, with respect to God-talk (though quite what Kant’s representationalism amounts to here is not straightforward!).
For Kant there is something to be said for natural theology even in light of the scepticism about religious knowledge which follows from the doctrines of the first Critique. This need not detain us here, though. See Wood (1978) for a thorough discussion of Kant’s views on this, as expressed in these lectures.
To be clear: It is not an argument to a hermeneutic conclusion because it says nothing about how things are (and in fact in his presentation Kant appears to presuppose the hermeneutic conclusion). But equally, it is not an argument to a revolutionary conclusion, because it does not assume that the hermeneutic claim is false, as would be required for a revolutionary proposal (in fact, as noted, in his presentation Kant appears to presuppose the hermeneutic conclusion). It is just an argument to the conclusion that nondoxastic acceptance of religious claims is good in a particular way.
For recent discussion, see e.g. Garcia and King (2009).
There is an interesting discussion of related topics in Hare (2005).
What if our commitment to the principle that ought implies can is misguided, i.e. if we are not in fact free just because we are under an obligation? It seems to me that that would not matter here, as what is at issue is the moral status of our choices, and they are responsive not to the facts about our freedom so much as our commitments about our freedom. That the moral significance of choice does not turn on the facts about what the genuine possibilities are is the core lesson of Frankfurt’s famous discussion of the ‘principle of alternate possibilities’ (Frankfurt 1969), in which the key illustrative example involves a person whose belief that they are free to act in whichever way they choose seems sufficient to make them morally responsible for their choice.
You might think that if what is done is still morally good then it is too strong to say that acting well in a heteronymous way involves choosing badly. But we can do things badly without thereby doing things the worst way. It is better to choose the right thing for the wrong reason than to choose the wrong thing, granted. But that doesn’t mean that choosing the right thing for the wrong reason is not choosing badly. It is sufficient for cooking badly that one makes soup without adding salt, but one cooks even more badly if one also omits some other necessary ingredient.
Talk of ‘determining’ the will here is not to be taken to mean that our will is causally determined in heteronymous choice; rather, the thought is that in our act of willing we give undue priority to some external consideration and let it guide our choice unchecked. See Korsgaard’s discussion of this, and of the related issue of how, on Kant’s view, it can make sense to speak of anything other than fully autonomous action or willing as action or willing at all, in Korsgaard (1999).
See, e.g., the Lectures on Ethics (1784, 27:283–288), in which (it seems to me at least) various distinct problems with a morality of incentives are presented but not clearly differentiated.
Just to avoid confusion: opinion is not the only sort of doxastic attitude, for Kant—there are other sorts of doxastic attitudes which differ in respect of the quantity of evidence one has and the attendant confidence one has in the truth of their content. See Kant (1781/87), A795/B823ff, Chignell (2007). As far as the ideas I will be discussing are concerned, though, what goes for opinion goes for all doxastic attitudes.
Kant says, in the ‘Vienna Logic’ lecture transcripts, that ‘When I say I opine, I have to make a claim to knowledge. In opining I always take a step toward knowledge. For there is an insufficient ground, to which complements still must be added in order to make it perfect.’ (1780, 24:850)
See my (2012, Chap. 3, §5) for more discussion. As I argue in my (2011, Chap. 3, §6), it is actually not only the utility, construed just in terms of practical considerations, of some commitments which the fictionalist might appeal to, but I leave that aside for now.
Timothy Williamson, himself certainly not a Kantian, agrees that belief aims at knowledge (the fact that Williamson is not taking ‘knowledge’ to stand for consciously-very-well-grounded-and-certain beliefs, does not immediately undermine the significance of this for the dialectical point I am making): ‘[A]s a crude generalization, the further one is from knowing \(p\), the less appropriate it is to believe \(p\). Knowing is in that sense the best kind of believing. Mere believing is a kind of botched knowing’ (2000, p. 47). This is strikingly reminiscent of Kant’s transcribed remarks, quoted in n34, above.
When I speak of maximising our epistemic situation here, I mean with respect to a particular belief (which we are prone to have, or have some reason to adopt or uphold), not with respect to our beliefs in general (I do not, then, mean to appeal to a principle which would require us to have as much knowledge as possible, including all sorts of utterly trivial items of knowledge).
Clifford, as well as endorsing his notorious principle that ‘it is always wrong, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’ seems to endorse the stronger claim, for example when he says that ’[i]n regard .... to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authority of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions. The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day. The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and the responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power.’ (Clifford 1876, pp. 295–305, my emphasis.)
Murray argues (1993, p. 33) that it is a recurrent theme of the Christian tradition, whose God he is concerned with, that punishments are meted out in the next life to those who transgress. Lest anyone think that this view of God’s relationship to his creatures is an artefact just of Old Testament ‘fire and brimstone’ and that a distinctively Christian view would not countenance such a picture, note that Murray cites the New Testament Romans 2:5 as well as the Old Testament Proverbs 29:1 in support of this (though I make no claims as to the theological merits of his understanding of Christian doctrine). Even if you are not impressed by an understanding of Christian doctrine which includes the serious possibility of eternal damnation, the ‘mere’ fact that one might miss out on the very highest rewards for eternity seems like a strong enough threat. After all, it is hard to see how it could be worthwhile to accept an eternity of less-than-perfection for the sake of any finite amount of pleasure or whatever else might be supposed to make wrongdoing worthwhile.
This claim is defended at length in my (2012, Chap. 2; see also pp. 189–190).
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Acknowledgments
I would not have been able to write this paper were it not for several discussions with my York colleague Nick Jones, in which he drew my attention to Murray’s treatment of the problem of the hiddenness of God. Thanks to audiences at the Second Glasgow Philosophy of Religion Seminar and the York Work in Progress Seminar, who responded to my reconstruction of the Kantian arguments in what is now the “Kant’s Moral Hazard Argument” section with valuable questions and feedback. Thanks also to Craig French and Lee Walters who both provided written comments on a previous draft of this paper, and to an anonymous referee for this journal. I should also like to point out that since much of my thinking about the issues in this paper stems from my doctoral work, my thanks to my supervisor, Mark Eli Kalderon, and others who helped me with that project (including the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Royal Institute of Philosophy, which provided funding) should be repeated here.
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Jay, C. The Kantian Moral Hazard Argument for religious fictionalism. Int J Philos Relig 75, 207–232 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-013-9435-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-013-9435-0