Reflections on the Moral Argument, Part 3

So I said that in this installment I would begin to discuss my dissertation. Writing a dissertation is a daunting task. For many, it’s the first real test of whether or not one can rise to the occasion in graduate school and produce something of an original work in one’s field. The prospect of failing seems to hang heavily in the air. I remember perusing the finished, bound dissertations from previous students in my program in the department’s library and reminding myself it could be done. I prayed a lot during that time that God would help me write something solid.

I filled up the binder I mentioned last time with dozens and dozens of relevant articles on the Euthyphro Dilemma. Then I filled up another, then another—I ended up with about a dozen or so binders full of articles. Then I set myself to the task of reading each one and taking notes on them. My plan for quite a while was to read one article per day and write up a summary about it, and I kept to that plan for many consecutive months. It doesn’t sound like a lot, and perhaps it wasn’t, but there’s quite a bit of power to doing anything consistently.

As I look back at that part of my life and work, I realize in retrospect that my approach could have been better. What I took to be a measure of hostility toward my theistic approach was probably exacerbated by my being a bit overly punchy at times. Christians in secular environments do sometimes find themselves feeling under attack, but on occasion they can imagine there’s more opposition than there really is. And without enough humility, they can exacerbate tensions needlessly.

I suspect I made numerous mistake during that time. I could be overly argumentative. I could fail to listen to and learn from opposing views as much as I should have. While at times I could be riddled with self-doubts, at other times I could be arrogant, thinking I had things figured out that I didn’t. I could underestimate the difficulties attending my own positions and exaggerate the challenges faced by my interlocutors. Admittedly I felt put on the defensive at times, and figured at the time that my attitude and approach was appropriate and called for, and sometimes it was. But sometimes it wasn’t. I was young and ambitious and, in some ways, emotionally immature. I could and should have been more cooperative and more teachable, but I think too often I saw the challenge of defending theistic ethics as my part to play in the culture war.

As the years have gone by, the culture war mentality has grown tired for me. Certainly we are involved in a battle of sorts. The Bible tells us as much, but it’s a battle of a certain kind. We wrestle, we are told, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers, spiritual forces of darkness, and the like. This surely means that we ought to bathe our projects, whether it be a doctoral dissertation or anything else, in a great deal of prayer. We need to pray for God to inspire our work and empower us to do his will. But our enemies are not fellow human beings made in God’s image. In retrospect, I can see that I had a great deal more to learn from my secular teachers than to teach them. They were superb philosophers. I could have disagreed with them on occasion with quite a bit more grace and understanding.

It’s taken me a while to learn this lesson and apply it more broadly. In my reading during much of graduate school, I was often too fixated on points of disagreement with those I read. I was always poised to look for mistakes, for leaps of reasoning, for nefarious implicit assumptions. That can and should be part of how we read critically, and I got it down to a science. But where I lagged behind was reading charitably, looking for genuine insights even among those I differed from, finding common ground, even shared humanity.

If I were to be honest, I think at root I was motivated all too often by a sort of fear. Fear that if I conceded too much, my own approach would fall short. Fear of not being countercultural enough. Fear of allowing myself to be overly affected by a secular mindset. I was still trying to spread my intellectual wings and find my voice, and it was intimidating to be surrounded by lots of good thinkers who disagreed with me and didn’t share my worldview convictions. The temptation to hunker down and go into a survival and combative mode was a strong one. But in time I came to see that if we work hard and master our field, we can be confident without being dogmatic. We can have something to teach while remaining teachable, be tenacious without being defensive. We can have the courage of our convictions while being appropriately modest.

At any rate, the dissertation gradually took shape. I wanted to hold off giving individual chapters to my advisor until I wrote the whole thing in order to articulate my vision of how it all held together without getting derailed along the way. This may have led to the dissertation taking longer than it otherwise would have, but the experience did give me the chance to spell out my vision at the time, such as it was, of theistic ethics. Again, the dissertation was an attempt to defend theistic ethics from various objections often thought intractable, many of them deriving from the Euthyphro Dilemma.

The dissertation ended up five chapters long. I started by laying out the Euthyphro Dilemma, then I discussed an Anselmian conception of God (omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc.), then a theory of the good, then a theory of the right, then a chapter called “Why a Good God Issues Bad Commands.” I’ll discuss aspects of each chapter next time, but two last things for now. I’m looking at my dissertation as I write this, and I note two things. It’s dedicated to my parents: “To my parents, Leonard and Evelyn Baggett, for their years of support and encouragement, whose lives provided to me a model of practical theistic ethics.” And of the four committee members, two of them have, like my parents, now passed away: Bill Stine and Herb Granger. Such fond memories of them all. A poignant reminder we’re here but for a season.

— David Baggett is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University. He is the author or editor of about fifteen books, most recently Ted Lasso and Philosophy: No Question Is Into Touch edited with Marybeth Baggett.

Image by Tim from Pixabay