ARE VALUES (for example moral values) grounded in something real and objective or are they just a way of talking about whatever we may personally happen to approve of? There has been a remarkable shift in philosophical views about this since I was an undergraduate. Back in the Sixties, when we were all still under the shadow of logical positivism, moral beliefs (“value judgments”, as we often pejoratively called them) were dismissed as subjective — mere expressions of emotion, mere grunts of approval or disapproval. Notions such as goodness were no more than pseudo-properties, masking our personal desires and preferences. Later on, with the rise of postmodernism, even truth became suspect, and was downgraded to no more than an honorific label that a given culture bestows on its favoured assertions.
But it is very striking how the popularity of these subjectivist creeds has faded in more recent times. Relativistic views of truth turned out to be self- defeating; while in ethics, subjectivism ran into a host of logical difficulties and is now on the wane, eclipsed by a growing number of neo-objectivist theories. To everyone’s surprise, the increasing consensus among philosophers today is that some kind of objectivism of truth and of value is correct.
This is a result that every religious believer ought to welcome. Of course the objectivity of value does not prove the existence of God — there may be other explanations (though to my mind those so far on offer are not very promising). But the objectivity of value and truth would at least be strikingly consistent with the traditional view of God. For the God who is the object of worship in the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions is conceived of as the objective, independent reality who is the sole fountainhead of truth, beauty and goodness — the giver (as the Epistle of James puts it) of “every good and every perfect gift”.
The idea of a unitary source of truth, beauty and goodness is also found in Ancient Greek philosophy, well before Christ. Plato famously argued that we should struggle out of the dark cave that is our normal human environment towards an eternal realm of value he called the Forms, a unified realm with a single supreme Form of the Good at its apex. Later, René Descartes, following Plato (via St Augustine), made the closest possible link between the good and the true. The nature of truth and of goodness is such that, once we clearly perceive them, they both constrain our judgment (to assent to the true, to desire the good). In both cases, says Descartes, “a great light in the intellect generates a great propensity in the will”.
But is all this ancient history? Today, many people would probably regard the idea that goodness, truth and beauty are interconnected as outlandish. They might allow it a sentimental value, and might recall with a sort of wistful nostalgia Keats’s famous lines “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all/ Ye know on Earth or ever need to know”; but they would be unlikely to allow it a serious place in their belief system.
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The fact remains, however, that there are certain remarkable properties that truth, beauty and goodness all share. In the first place, they are all what philosophers call normative concepts — they carry with them the sense of a requirement or a demand. The true is that which is worthy of belief — “to be believed”; the beautiful is that which is worthy of admiration; and the good is that which is worthy of choice. They all therefore seem to be rather “ queer” properties (as the late Oxford philosopher John Mackie once put it). They have this odd, magnetic aspect — they somehow have “to-be-pursuedness” built into them.
Why is this odd? Well, it is a feature that seems incompatible with any purely naturalistic or scientific account of these properties: for it is not easy to see how a purely natural or empirically definable item could have this strange “normativity” or choice-worthiness somehow packed into it. So it starts to look as if thinking about these normative concepts is going to take us beyond the purely natural or empirical domain.
Few put it more resonantly than the 17th-century philosopher Peter Sterry, who declared that the stream of the divine love is the source of “all truths, goodness, joys, beauties and blessedness”. Though such a vision may at first sound idealistic or mystical, it may well turn out to be consistent with the results of philosophical inquiry. And it is a vision that may also serve to inspire us as we strive to make what tiny progress we may, out of the cave, and towards the light.
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John Cottingham is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. His latest book, The Spiritual Dimension, was published last year by Cambridge University Press.