Kenny writes:
But although we may use metaphors to describe our scientific theories, the science itself is not simply a collection of metaphors. And I mention this because some thinkers (C.S. Lewis and Rudolph Steiner, among others) have argued that morality is an objective fact just as science is. An intriguing thought, although I'm not sure I buy it.
I remember the first time I ran into that line of thinking. I was in high school, at some church function, and I was confessing that I didn't really understand the whole concept of why Jesus' death was supposed to redeem humanity. It just didn't make sense to me . . . God needs a human sacrifice to appease him? One guy, a visitor from some evangelical church, said that it didn't have to make sense. "It's just a brute fact." As far as he was concerned, there was no rationale to explain redemption through faith in Jesus Christ – but it was real to him, so he decided it was just an objective factor built into existence, as palpable as gravity and equally irreducible.
Steven Pinker recognized that the same sort of "well, it just is" argument could be brought to bear on the question of consciousness:
One [solution] is to say that the mysterious entities are an irreducible part of the universe and to leave it at that. The universe, we would conclude, contains space, time, gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces, matter, energy, and consciousness (or will, or selves, or ethics, or meaning, or all of them.) The answer to our curiosity about why the universe has consciousness is "Get over it, it just does." We feel cheated because no insight has been offered, and because we know the details of consciousness, will, and knowledge are minutely related to the physiology of the brain. The irreducibility theory leaves that a coincidence.
Like Kenny, I find that argument (and must call it an argument, because it is nothing like an explanation) to be "intriguing" but not convincing. The first time you apply it to something that baffles you (consciousness, for me) you feel particularly clever. But then when you hear someone apply the same reasoning to something you don't find baffling but merely untrue (like the cosmic necessity of Jesus' execution on the cross), you recognize that this is not reasoning at all, but merely an assertion made by someone who has run out steam on the subject. At that point, you realize that "it just is" is just a belligerent way of saying, "Heck, I don't know."
Kenny is correct that the use of metaphors in moral thinking does not mean morality is unreal. But there are better and worse metaphors to explain things . . . and I just want to be clear about which ones we're using, and what they imply.
