Statistics can so easily be manipulated to give misleading impressions that a famous little book is titled How to Lie With Statistics.  The author wrote it in 1954.  My economics professor assigned it in 1971.  It’s still in print.

Such cautions and warnings are all to the good.  It’s as easy to sucker people with statistics today as it ever was.  But many people, having learned that they can be fooled, refuse to accept any statistics whatsoever.  They assume that all statistics are lies.  Students diligently write down the numbers their teachers feed them, just in case they’re on the exam.  But many go on believing what they want to believe.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad if what they wanted to believe were guided by common sense.  But college in our day tends to be a destroyer of common sense, so all too often it’s coupled with epistemological relativism.  If what’s true for you may be false for me, why then, a lie for you may be honest for me.

Again, it is possible to fail in many ways, while to succeed is possible only in one way.  – Aristotle.

According to moral realists, like me, the sentence, “Murder is wrong,” means that murder, in fact, is wrong.  Such sentences are capable of being either true or false; this one happens to be true.   It describes the actual moral quality of murder, a property which belongs to the act irrespective of what any of us think, feel, or say about the matter.  If I say “Murder is right,” murder is still wrong.

In everyday speech we tend to use the term “relativism” as a catch-all for a variety of views which are actually somewhat different.  What they have in common is that they reject moral realism.  But they go off the rails for different reasons.

The three most common kinds of moral anti-realism are relativism in the strict sense of the term, subjectivism, and non-cognitivism.  To the relativist in the strict sense, the sentence “Murder is wrong” means that murder is wrong in relation to the speaker.  Such sentences may be true for one person or group, he thinks, but false for another.  Maybe murder isn’t wrong for, say, assassins.

To the subjectivist, the sentence “Murder is wrong” may seem to tell us something about murder, but in fact it only tells us something about the speaker.  One well known variety of subjectivism holds that what it tells us about the speaker is his feelings about murder – perhaps something like, “I dislike it, and I want you to dislike it too.”  If the subjectivist says that such sentences are capable of being true or false – and he may not -- at best he means that they might be either correct or incorrect descriptions of the speaker’s emotions.  “It’s all about you.”

To the non-cognitivist, although the utterance “Murder is wrong” has the grammatical form of a sentence, it does not actually express a proposition at all.  Consequently it is no more capable of being true or false than an utterance like “Whoops,” “blimey,” or “I’ll be dog-goned.”

A recent newsletter of the American Maritain Association reminds us of the split personality of France, a country long noted for devotion to both Bastille Day and the feast day of Joan of Arc.  The mid-century Thomist, Jacques Maritain, hoped that his country’s Christian aspirations might be harmonized with its avowed dedication to liberty.  That was a tall order, because French faith had too often been united with the cause of reaction, and the notion of liberty with the cause of violent, anti-Christian revolution.

Good point.  Let us add that our country long enjoyed an advantage France did not have, because our founders were harmonizers from the beginning.  Faith and reason, ancients and moderns, were all drawn into the struggle for self-government.  Christian republicans and moderate admirers of the Enlightenment made common cause.  For a while it seemed to work.

But there was no real synthesis, only a colloidal suspension.  Eventually the elements settled out, like milk and cream.  Although from its first centuries the Church has united faith and reason, the young republic’s most influential religious movements tended to hold intellect in suspicion.  Although American proponents of natural rights were the beneficiaries of a rich and ancient tradition, they were ungrateful ones, adopting “made simple” versions of natural law theory that ultimately came to seem unbelievable.  Now, having thrown away faith, those who formerly styled themselves defenders of reason can no longer bring themselves to believe in reason either.  Abandoning God, they have even lost man.

So the European crisis of culture is our crisis too.  “American exceptionalism” means simply that here it has taken longer to come to a head.  Could there have been a real cultural synthesis?  Yes -- and there still could be, for faith and reason really are allies, and our past mistakes are not an irresistible fate.  But can it be achieved in the way we have previously gone about it?  That road is closed.

This reader hails from down under.  Although it’s student letter day, I’m not certain that she is a student -- but I do think students will enjoy her question.

Question:

I have been listening to your online lectures about Natural Law and conscience, and a question, or an objection, has come to mind.  Sociologists have pinpointed three types of worldview cultures: innocence/guilt-based (Christians, Jews), fear-based (pagans, some tribal cultures) and honor/shame-based (other tribal cultures, Islam, the ancient Greeks and Trojans in the Iliad, etc).

You say that everyone has a conscience that points to Natural Law, e.g. not to harm others, but this is only true with innocence/guilt cultures, not honor-based ones.  Honor-based warriors do not feel guilt if they kill someone: they are only concerned with honor.  So appeals to Natural Law would not be universal.  What are your thoughts on this, please?

Reply:

Thank you for your question.  Natural law thinkers use the word “conscience” for moral knowledge.  The sociologists who distinguish among guilt cultures, fear cultures, and shame cultures are using the term “conscience” for moral feelings.  What we know expresses itself in what we feel, but knowledge and feelings are not the same thing.

The claim of natural law thinkers is that people of all cultures know the moral basics:  Honor your parents, do not murder, be faithful to your spouse, and so forth.  Whether people of all cultures feel the same way when they act in violation of the moral basics is another question.  (Even in what you are calling a guilt culture, persons who have guilty knowledge don’t always have guilty feelings -- though I think they do show other signs of guilty knowledge.)

Since natural law thinkers are speaking of knowledge, and the sociologists to whom you refer are speaking of feelings, the sociologists are not actually refuting the claim of the natural law thinkers; they are talking about something else.  Does this help?

If you’d like to know more about how guilty knowledge works, you can find a more complete discussion in my book What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide .

“In my experience, university-educated people believe that staying within the protocols of consent and good intentions absolves a person of moral responsibility for any suffering they might inflict in their personal lives.  ‘Who have you hurt without meaning to?’ is a hard question for anyone to answer honestly, but decadence makes it harder.”

-- Helen Andrews, First Things