A Head-Spinning Spiritual Marketing Campaign

Sitting at our Thursday philosophical lunch, something struck me as an explanation for Rob’s original sentiment in that debate.

Morality is the domain of choice and action. Where there is no choice, there is no need for morality; where there is no action, there is nothing to judge morally. So whenever people talk about Original Sin I hear a category error: you cannot be morally responsible for someone else's free choice/action.

Now, virtues are the means by which we gain and keep values. For example, rationality is a means to knowledge, and productivity is a means to stuff. Virtues (and vices) are a species of choices/actions: the kind by which we gain and keep values (or the opposite). Values (and disvalues) are a species of fact: what furthers our life (or degrades it). When we appraise someone morally, the whole point is to look for virtue and vice -- we are examining their choices and actions. Even if we look at the effects of their actions, it is for the purpose of inferring something about the cause. WHAT people have, like houses, iPods, and beliefs are not in themselves praiseworthy -- it is HOW people come by such things where moral judgment comes in (after all, they could come from someone being productive or an embezzler, honest or a shoplifter, rational or irrational). Choices and actions are the objects of moral evaluation; their products like iPods and beliefs are not.

That is why I'm hearing another category error as people talk about eternal rewards based on presence of a certain belief, independent of the cause. It would be different if believers were saying He was rewarding people based on that belief because it indicates mental virtue (say, rationality) -- but they have said explicitly that’s not the case. By their account, God is in fact doling out reward and suffering based on mere presence of a belief, independent of its cause. He is doling out reward and suffering based on something outside the sphere of moral evaluation.

So hearing the core rationale of Christians’ spiritual marketing campaign, I’m left scratching my head at category errors in both the central problem and its sole solution. You are damned for something that can't have anything to do with your moral status, and the one way out of that miserable moral condition is to buy eternal reward with something that's no moral coin.