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BOOK REVIEWS Kai Nielsen. Ethics Without God. London: Pemberton Books, 1973. Pp. 103. $7.95. As the book title would indicate, Mr. Nielsen wishes to separate morality from any logical connection with religion. Accordingly, Nielsen opposes a logical identity of morality with religion, or any philosophical schemes in which either morality is derivable from religion, or religion is derivable from morality. In turn, Nielsen's own secular ethics would seem to be such that enlightened morality (i.e., a consequentialist, secular ethics) cannot but be partially incompatible with religious beliefs; and since Nielsen finds religious language incoherent (cf. p. 31 ft., as well as his Contemporary Critiques of Religion, Scepticism, etc.), it would seem he leans to the stronger view that true humanistic ethics is simply incompatible with religious morality. What I believe Nielsen fails to consider, and what I would argue to be the case, is that while neither religion nor morality are mutually derivable (a point Nielsen effectively argues), nonetheless, they are consistent despite their logical independence from one another. To be sure, Nielsen's critique of religious morality (more properly interpreted as theological voluntarism) by the so-called Euthyphro-critique is successful; i.e., God wills X because X is a good act rather than X's being a good act because God wills X. To equate the meaning of " g o o d " with "what is willed by G o d , " or the meaning of "evil" with "what is forbidden by G o d " obviously opens the theological voluntarist to the charge that, for example, "if God wills X, then X is good" becomes the pleonastic and hardly action-guiding statement "if G o d wills X, then God wills X." In short, I would agree with Nielsen that the various formulations of the supernaturalistic fallacy hold firm. For Nielsen, God's willing X or forbidding Y is never a necessary nor sufficient condition for X's being good, or Y's being a bad act. While I confess some hesitation with the last point, surely one need not altogether abandon religious morality by admitting with Nielsen that there are independent standards of appraising what is good or bad, right or wrong, obligatory or forbidden. A religious moralist can admit all this, for to borrow an expression of Russell's, the theist also has a robust sense of reality. Accordingly, I see no reason why a religious moralist (or more specifically a Christian absolutist) must take issue with Nielsen's view that " a n understanding of goodness is logically prior to, and is independent of, any understanding or acknowledgment of G o d " (p. 11). However, if it is part of Nielsen's critique to suggest that holders of religious morality exhibit "corrupt minds" (a curious and ironic twist on Anscombe's critique of secular consequentialism), the subscription to such a form of morality perhaps involving in certain instances a Kierkegaardian "teleological suspension of the ethical," then I would strongly disagree with Nielsen. That is, a common tactic adopted by non-theists is to assume that because a successful case can be made against religious morality by countering the logical derivability thesis, that this ploy is sufficient to establish the incompatibility thesis as well. For example, it is often suggested that religious moralists practice crisis theology such that certain acts which are clearly moral are defeasible in light of a putative divine command. Perhaps, the classic example of this is that of God's alleged command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, where the moral principle at issue - fathers providing for the welfare of their children - seems to be called in question out of fideistic obedience to a divine promulgation. I shall not take up at this time this classic case, having done so already at considerable length in my Logical Analysis and Contemporary Theism. Suffice it to say that I know of no situation where the secularist can point to a clear violation of a moral principle (that is, a

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moral principle which is agreed upon by both deontologists and teleologists) in light of (and causally the product of) obedience to an opposing religious maxim. Since the incompatibility charge is raised by the secularist, it would seem that the onus probandi is placed on him to offer a concrete challenge. Accordingly, to uphold the Euthyphro dictum need not commit a philosopher to maintaining that religion and morality are thereby incompatible. The latter thesis needs independent support. It also strikes me that Nielsen is much too facile (and perhaps ingenuous) in identifying Christian morality with Anscombe's moral absolutism, along with various historical versions of the same found in Augustine and Pascal. Christian morality is not that excessively deontological, as but witness the Thomistic doctrine of double-effect, not to mention that enfant terrible - Christian situational ethics. To see the difficulty of stereotyping so-called Christian moralists, consider the recent eulogy by a priest in New Jersey comparing a slain Symbionese Liberation Army member to Christ (de rnortuis nil nisi bonum), or the sophistical nuances of the Jesuit advisor to the President of the United States! Ironically, at one point in the book under review, Nielsen resurrects that old warhorse (no pun intended) about the Crusades as a de facto exemplification of the normative policies of the religious moralist. Surely, if one wanted to show that Christian morality is not excessively deontological, the Crusades proved the point, being not only crassly expedient in design, but un-Christian as well! If I am not mistaken, Nielsen has managed to underplay the significant and overplay the insignificant. To be sure, it is indeed an unfortunate charge by Anscombe that non-religious moralists exhibit "corrupt minds," but Nielsen parlays this rhetorical brickbat to the limit (cf. p. 66 ft.). Peter Geacb in God and The Soul also makes a somewhat similar exaggerated claim when he speaks of the logical asymmetry between good and bad acts. Pace Geach (and pro Nielsen), it is false that an act cannot be good if it contains some evil in it. I should quickly add that I am not convinced that Geach is a religious absolutist in the same strict sense as is Anscombe, for Geach speaks of moral tests of religious promulgations (e.g., if an alleged divine decree required an act of lying, the intrinsic evil of lying would point to the inauthenticity of such a putative decree). Nonetheless, I believe Nielsen fails to appreciate the force of Geach's remark that "the knowledge of God is thus not prerequisite to our having any moral knowledge . . . however . . . we do need it in order to see that we must not do evil that good may come, and that this principle actually follows from a certain conception of G o d " (p. 120). The expression "not doing evil that good may come" is understood by Geach to mean that certain sorts of acts are intrinsically evil and that their performance must be avoided, even if some good could be brought about by the performance. I am afraid Geach is not at all consistent here, for he wants to apparently include as examples of such a c t s - adultery, infanticide, lying - yet he talks of their general undesirability not their universal undesirability! However, I suspect if the acts in question involved the punishment of the innocent, then Geach and Anscombe would no doubt swear absolutist fidelities on this score. In the last chapter of Ethics Without God, Nielsen offers some examples of moral casuistry one thought had vanished in old Scholastic textbooks. However, while designed to show the flexibility of Nielsen's self-proclaimed "radical" secular, consequentialist ethic, and the "monstrous" normative policies of religious moralists (identified solely with Anscombean absolutists), I believe the proffered resolutions on the whole support my contention that Christian morality is quite compatible with secular ethics, which (Christian) morality unlike the latter provides both an ontological and psychological level to the ethical dimension of life. Incidentally, the latter factors obviate the criticism of Occam's razor - for religious beliefs do make a difference. Nielsen speaks of man's having certain basic desires, needs and wants - principally for

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happiness - which involve freedom from pain, as well as security, emotional peace, human love and companionship, etc. He contends that man can find "lasting sources of h u m a n happiness in a purely secular world" (p. 53). Such a remark is, in my judgement, not only quixotic but false, and Nielsen obliquely admits as much in writing: "it is childish to think that by human effort we will some day totally rid the world of suffering and hate, of deprivation and sadness; they are a permanent feature of the human condition" (p. 53). But such a finding permits the Christian absolutist to claim that religion is needed to complement the moral dimension of human existence, and give it full meaning. It may be true to say with Nielsen that man will not necessarily despair without a God, but it remains an open question as to whether man can ever be (truly) happy without a God. Nielsen concludes with four desert island cases designed to show how the adherence on the part of the religious moralist to that hallowed principle - "The direct intention of the death of an innocent person is never justifiable" proves "monstrous" when applied in the practical sphere. Alternatively, Nielsen wants to uphold his view that: " . . . actions, rules, policies, practices and moral principles are ultimately to be judged by certain consequences; to wit, whether doing them more than, or at least as much as, doing anything else or acting in accordance with them more than or at least as much as, acting in accordance with alternative principles, tends, on the whole, and for everyone involved, to maximize satisfaction, that is, to maximize happiness, minimize pain, enhance self-consciousness and preserve one's sense of self-identity" (pp. 65-66, cf. p. 79). Case One involves an innocent fat man who upon leading an expedition from the mouth of a cave gets lodged in the entrance. If the remaining party inside the cave does not blast him out (presumeably they have dynamite), they will all perish from the approaching high tide. Nielsen's ethic allows them to do this to the innocent, obese man, but surely NieIsen's case is really quite silly. One wonders how the man ever got into the cave in the first place? Case One is incoherent, and hardly a viable challenge to the religious moralist. Case Two involves a party of five on a liferaft, with one and only one member of said group being old, dependent-less, and hence for Nielsen's ethic dispensable in light of the impending food shortage, excessive weight on the raft, etc. Here the (orthodox) Christian moralist (but no doubt not the Christian situational ethician) would disagree with Nielsen's justification for throwing the old man overboard (on the teleological principle that it is better to save four lives and sacrifice one than not to sacrifice one and lose all five) and rightly disapprove the murder of the dispensable oldster. A similar verdict anti-Nielsen holds for Case Three where our liferaft is now inhabited by only two itinerants, one of whom is of average intelligence, the other of whom is a scientific ~bermensch, about to uncover the secrets of cancer. To get rid of the "average Joe" (as Nielsen's ethic advises) in such a situation makes one cringe, upon extrapolating, to envision Nielsen's possible ethical views on social engineering, etc. Incidentally, in light of the current furor over Drs. Shockley and Jensen et al, there seems to be a covert feeling on the part of their detractors to believe t h a t / f e v e r they were proven correct in their genetic claims, and Blacks really were ex hypothesi intellectually inferior (innately) to Whites, that one would then have good reason to conclude that Blacks were also morally inferior to Whites. The conclusion is surely fallacious, but it is interesting (and depressing) to reflect how secular consequentialists may well feel forced to accept such a conclusion, given their utilitarian predilections. However, even if it were proven beyond a shadow of doubt that Blacks were intellectually inferior to Whites, for a Christian moralist this would be an interesting empirical finding, but it would not in the least affect his moral appraisal of Blacks as fellow h u m a n beings (cf. p. 79). Case Four involves a deranged matriarch who rules a small country whose citizens are

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starving, yet the matriarch refuses to release governmental funds that could alleviate the hunger, and the palace guard true to cherished professional standards, refuse to be disloyal to her. Nielsen's ethic here advocates killing the matriarch, but so too would the religious moralist (if that were the only route available) out of deference to canons of selfdefense. However in Case Four, it would be inappropriate for a religious moralist to desscribe the killing of the matriarch as a directly willed act - rather what was directly willed was the citizens' own self-preservation, and the matriarch attempted to deny the citizens this inalienable right to life. Pace Nielsen, I fail to see where his desert island cases show either the inconsistency or the moral monstrosity of the religious moralist's position. Indeed, Nielsen proceeds to outline three additional cases where his ethic can be (but need not be) de facto supportive of moral absolutism. These cases involve respectively a magistrate who knowingly sentences an innocent victim to death out of fear of a threatening mob's demand for telishment (Case Five) ; a situation where an innocent man is killed so that an indispensable serum can be developed from his diseased corpse (Case Six); and lastly, a Fuehrer-type who orders a person to torture an innocent man or he will torture five innocent persons instead (Case Seven). Like the Christian absolutist, Nielsen finds the performance of the actions in Cases Five, Six, and Seven to be morally reprehensible. I have previously criticized Nielsen's facile caricature of Christian morality with Anscombe's absolutism. Oddly enough, if one considers aprimafacie candidate for the title of religious moralist, then surely Thomas Aquinas fits the bill. Yet St. Thomas in Summa Theologica II-1I, q.67, a.2, c. relates the case of a judge who privately knows of an indicted man's innocence, yet sentences the man to death as a result of the juridical proceeding's prosecution of the case. St. Thomas writes : "a good judge does nothing according to his private opinion, but pronounces sentence according to the law and the right. Now this is to pronounce judgment according to what is alleged and proved in court. Therefore, a judge ought to pronounce judgment in accordance with these things, and not according to his private opinion." I suspect Nielsen would agree with me that in Anscombe's words such an acceptance of juridical telishment exhibits a "corrupt mind," but the point is clear - not all Christian moralists are deontologists ~. Indeed, not all secular consequentialists would agree with Nielsen's version of utilitarianism - as but witness a typical rule-utilitarian's verdict in Cases Two and Three. It is ironical that Nielsen uses Cases One - Four to allegedly disprove moral absolutism, for he confesses he thinks poorly of desert-island cases (cf. p. 88 ft.), and admits that morality is not at all like exercising the propositional calculus, for many moral dilemmas involve considerable risk. I would agree with Nielsen that "finally we must just decide whether to assent to a Christian way of life rather than to a secular one" (p. 42, cf. p. 60). Nonetheless, I believe Nielsen has failed to establish that subscription to a Christian way of life involves or entails any morally monstrous behavior. John Donnelly Fordham University

I have raised in conversation with Elizabeth Anscombe this example from the Summa Theologica and surprisingly (and I believe inconsistently) she sides with St. Thomas' verdict!

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Eric P. Polten. Critique of the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory: A Refutation of Scientific

Materialism and an Establishment of Mind-Matter Dualism by Means of Philosophy and Scientific Method. The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Ppp. xviii, 290. Indexed. Dfl. 34. For the past decade, literature addressed to the mind-body controversy has tended toward either monism or neutrality. The monism is materialist, the neutrality is grounded in ordinary language. Smart, Armstrong, K. Campbell, and others tell us that dualism is incoherent, and suggest that the alternative monist view, idealism, no longer requires serious attention. Malcolm, offering an exposition of the later Wittgenstein, says simply that "there are no more knots," implying that the problem is not an ontological one, that materialism is as unintelligible as the other positions. In the face of these trends, a defense of dualism provides the exciting prospect of a "novel" point of view. Eric Polten has attempted such a defense in his Critique of the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory. The novelty of this perspective rests with the success of Polten's arguments. Polten believes his serious opponents to be materialists who claim that the mind is identical to operations in the cerebral cortex (the writings of Herbert Feigl are taken as the materialist paradigm). Ordinary language philosophers and idealists are tossed aside in a few pithy paragraphs. Three kinds of objections to the Identity Theory divide the book: linguistic, methodological, and empirical. The dualist alternative emerges amid this c,'itique. Two versions of the identity theory are set out in the introduction of the book. The first: "'that there is a synthetic (basically empirical) relation of systemic identity between the designata of the phenomenal predicates and the designata of certain neurophysiological terms." (p. 12) The second: that the language of scientific theory will be sufficient to explain whatever is covered by "intersubjective observation language." In the first chapter Polten claims to defeat both of these formulations with a simple argument. The identity theorists must maintain Frege's distinction between sense and reference. For example, "There is a white cloud" and "Neural net 374 is active" clearly have different senses, but an identity theorist would say that they have one referent (i.e., the activity of a certain region of the cortex). Polten argues that two senses can never have but one referent. If there were but one referent, then the difference between the senses would vanish. (p. 29) Polten's attack on the identity theorists' use of the sense-reference distinction is made plausible by the difficulty philosophers have had in giving an account of the identity of an individual thing through time (cf. Hume). But whatever the difficulty in giving the correct account, it is unlikely that things do not have an identity through time. One can construct reductio arguments to show that individuals must exist through time (e.g., language would be unintelligible without such existence and language is intelligible), and yet fail to give an adequate philosophical account of how such existence is possible and an account of the nature of this existence (if indeed, it has a nature). It is perfectly reasonable to say that "Scott" and "the author of Waverly" refer to the same man and not to different characteristics of something that may or may not be a unity. Thus, Polten's argument from the sense-reference distinction is too strong. If we accept it, then no theory will stand, nothing can be said. And Polten is concerned with what can be said, for throughout the book he uses the incompatibility of positions such as empiricism, nominalism, and physicalism with any reasonable account of standards as a decisive criticism of these positions. We might consider extending Polten's "sense-reference" argument to show that two utterances of an expression could not have the same referent. I note at this point the cavalier way in which Polten dismisses ordinary language philosophy. A remark on p. 24 is characteristic of his treatment: "There is little point in arguing with people who, after some three thousand years of knowledge on this subject, still

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do not see the difference between a real question and a verbal question." Some of us would be relieved if Wittgenstein, Austin, and others could be dismissed so easily. While still in the first chapter of the book Polten takes on the problem of perception. He cites three theories: direct realism, phenomenalism, and the causal theory. Direct realism is undercut with art appeal to neurophysiology, phenomenalism by noting that processes in nature do not depend upon our awareness. (pp. 36-37) This leaves us with the causal theory. Polten tells us that the causal theory is a major premise of the book. (p. 40) Despite the apparent argument by cases (i.e., there are only three theories, two of which won't do), Polten grants the causal theory of perception the status of an assumption. Although Polten is a rationalist and a realist, displaying a healthy concern for the truth about what there is, it is not clear as to whether the truth of his assumption is to be based on self-evident certainty, on its being self-evidently the best bet, or on arguments from more primitive propositions. The evidential status of the causal theory is of utmost importance to Polten's work, a work claimed by its author to contain the outlines of the solutions to both the mind-body problem and the problem of perception. Note that the causal theory, if true, is the solution to the problem of perception. But how can we know if it is true, or even if it is probably true? It is this question that has kept many philosophers (see Hume again) from taking mind-body dualism seriously. Difficulties for the causal theory begin when one asks, given the theory, with what is one directly acquainted. Polten denies a materialist answer to the question (that we are acquainted with our brain states), and supplies the dualist alternative (that we are acquainted with our conscious states). The causal theory makes claims about the existence, the activity, and the causal connections of a large number of items that are not found among our conscious states (e.g., external objects which send "messages" to the surface of a retina, the activity of rods and cones in the retina, the firing of neurons in the optic nerve, and the firing of neurons in the sensory projection and association areas of the cortex). In brief, the causal theory rules out our acquaintance with any of the evidence required for its verification. Since we do not find alternatives to the theory inconceivable, nor find denial of the theory self-contradictory, there seems to be no good reason for accepting it. References to physiology fall prey to Polten's own critique of Feigl: "Since the premises of physiology are among the propositions into whose validity we are inquiring, it is hardly likely that its conclusions will assist us." (p. 99) Polten's appeal to the primacy of conscious states occurs in the second chapter, which deals with methodological objections to the identity theory. In this chapter and the next (on empirical objections), Polten levels the most telling arguments against the identity theory. These arguments lead him to pronounce on a variety of fundamental metaphysical questions, pronouncements which are usually lively and interesting, and which are often illuminating. To this reader the strength of Polten's book lies in his observations on teleology and determinism, first principles and the status of scientific claims, the existence and nature of substance, and the relation between the self and choice. Although I am unconvinced by his "solution" to the mind-body problem, a rather exciting metaphysical tour made the book well worth reading. Polten's general view of the relation between mind and body consists of four layers of causal interaction. At the extremes are "the world of mental entities as things in themselves" and "the world of material entities as things in themselves." The world of mental entities is the cause or ground of the domain of mental phenomena of inner sense. The world of material entities is the cause of the domain of mental phenomena of outer sense. Body is the world of material entities. Mind consists of outer sense, inner sense, and mental entities as things in themselves. The principal criterion for distinguishing body from mind is that the former is always capable of giving rise to public or qualitatively shared percep-

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tions in different onlookers, the latter can never give rise to such perceptions. (p. 192) Electromagnetic fields are not observable by outer sense (according to Polten), and thus fall under his definition of mental. Energy (which is "ontologically prior to matter") is also taken to be mental. (p. 258) Polten concludes, " A dualist interactionism therefore emerges out of the foregoing destructive critique as the most probable alternative to psycho-physical monism." (p. 258) But the question of evidence remains. I shall let Polten finish this review, the reader can draw his own conclusion. "Yet if such a causal theory of perception within materialism is accepted, it is not easy to escape the solipsistic view that all things experienced or known, including 'external objects', are brain s t a t e s . . . Although I also accept a causal theory of perception, I do not think that dualism has similarly unacceptable solipsistic implications. Mind, or more particularly, reason, is omnipresent, as opposed to the spatio-temporal specificity and self-containedness of matter." (p. 196) William J. Edgar S.U.N.Y. College at Geneseo