God and non-consequentialism

At the risk of turning this blog into footnotes-to-Balkinization, rereading Philip Pettit's wonderfully concise brief for consequentialism made me think a bit on Brian Tamanaha's takedown of Michael Perry's odd claim that atheism provides inadequate grounding for human rights. Tamanaha notes that theists are on equally shaky ground, since a loss of faith in the deity undermines the moral code that flows from divine command just as surely as a loss of faith in The Moral Law Within does for the Kantian atheist.

I wonder if perhaps the theist's worry is better interpreted as a claim that non-consequentialism becomes unstable without a god, combined with the assumption that consequentialist derivations of human rights are somehow deficient. And I actually think there's something to the first half of that. As Pettit puts it when explaining the attractions of consequentialism: "There may be features that mark [values that ought to be honored in one's choices, rather than promoted by one's choices] off from other values, but why do those features matter so much? That question typically goes unconsidered by non-consequentialists. Not only do they have a duality then where consequentialists have a unity; they also have an unexplained duality."

Divine-command theists have an easy rejoinder to Pettit: human dignity, etc., is to be honored rather than consequentially (and hence contingently) promoted because God says so. The insertion of God allows non-consequentialists to have a monist theory, just like consequentialists. The Tamanaha-inspired rejoinder might be: but you are still held hostage to the possibility that God does not exist, which is on no more secure footing than whatever meta-ethical grounding a Kantian could come up with. And this is right, but it's a different sort of insecurity. Skeptical meta-ethical arguments of the John Mackie sort--that it's just bizarre to imagine any sort of natural property that would automatically carry the ought-to-be-done-ness [especially of the dualist, non-consequentialist sort!] that characterizes morality--really fail against theism. It's really easy to imagine divine-command morality; you just straightforwardly analogize secular authority and attach it to an omnipotent being.

But what's happened is that the weak point in the argument has shifted from the meta-ethical (what sort of thing is morality; how could it be dualist?) to the straightforwardly metaphysical (how could there be a god of the sort my meta-ethics posits?). And here the theists run into trouble; the existence of such a god is no more reasonable for being easy to imagine, because this ease is fully explained by reasons that have nothing to do with the truth of the claim. Unicorns are easy to imagine, too.

At any rate, though, none of this is an issue unless one concedes that there's something objectionable about consequentialism. And I think most worries on this score are due to a misunderstanding of the theory, which can in fact provide a secure basis--on both the personal and the institutional levels--for human rights. After all, as Austin so wonderfully put it: "It was never contended or conceived by a sound, orthodox utilitarian, that the lover should kiss his mistress with an eye to the common weal." (Province of Jurisprudence Determined, Hart ed., p. 108; quoted in Pettit.)