A formal moral argument sometimes put forward for divine existence runs as follows:
Premise 1: If 'God' does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Premise 2: Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Conclusion: Therefore 'God' exists.
According to William Lane Craig, a proponent of this argument,
"To say there are objective moral values is to say something is good or evil
independently of whether anybody believes it to be so."
But if moral values are independent of everyone's evaluation
this leaves Craig with significant problems.
One is that, if two humans perform an action
one thinking it evil, the other having no sense that it's evil
what they believe about their behaviour is not irrelevant to our moral assessment.
If someone is genuinely ignorant of what they do
we don't accept their harmful behaviour and we restrain it if possible.
But we don't call it evil.
Craig's idea that something is evil, whether or not anyone believes so
clearly doesn't reflect the way we tend to make moral judgments.
The idea of evil is only relevant in proportion to an agent's understanding,
which is one reason we don't judge other animals by human standards.
Craig thinks non-believers who see anything special about human morality
have "succumb[ed] to the temptation of speciesism".
But noting that humans have greater capacity for moral reflection than other species
is not, as Craig insists, an unjustifiable bias.
It's a relevant difference.
In fact, given Craig's own claim that no moral dimension exists for non-human animals
the real speciesist would be Craig's god.
After all, what do we make of a being that, according to Craig
has decided that only one species is morally accountable
so that the human child-killer is evil
but the lion that kills other lions' cubs does nothing wrong?
However, a more basic problem for Craig
is that values are the result of the evaluation process.
Moral values refer to what we judge morally valuable or important.
So to say they apply independently of anyone's evaluation
- that some things have unevaluated value - becomes unintelligible.
It also lacks any practical application.
We may dismiss things right now which, given other information, we'd value.
But we can't go beyond the range of our own awareness
to see how unknown information would alter our values.
So unknown values, even if they existed
would only be relevant from the moment of their discovery
at which point, it would be far less metaphysically extravagant
to say we'd simply then made an evaluation
than say we'd discovered an unevaluated value.
It's true that, given more complete information
justifications for certain attitudes and behaviour will be exposed as false.
It's true that there can be subjective facts.
If you burn your finger, the pain you feel won't be merely a matter of opinion
even though it's subjective.
It's also true, as John Mackie notes, that given
sufficiently specified standards of morality
it will be an objective issue, a matter of truth and falsehood
how well any particular specimen measures up to those standards.
Of course, the choice of standards still won't be objective
but nor will it be completely arbitrary
because what we value isn't completely random
but highly influenced by the kind of creature we are.
So we can agree with Craig when he says most people think
there's an objective difference between torturing a child and caring for it;
that these are not morally indifferent acts.
However, just because we distinguish torture from caring
and find one bad and the other good
that doesn't mean we have to agree with Craig
that these behaviours are therefore good or evil independently of what anyone thinks.
Some defend objective values by claiming 'moral value' is a property we detect
with a special faculty of moral perception.
But notice this is no longer supporting divine existence
as the moral argument is claimed to
only proposing new phenomena in need of their own independent support.
And each has problems.
For example, how can it be shown that if someone says Q is morally good
they've detected a value of goodness that's part of Q itself
rather than simply made a subjective evaluation that it's good?
We can't appeal to consensus.
Agreement that Q is good still doesn't tell us that the goodness is part of Q
rather than something we're ascribing.
And besides, this particular moral argument deems agreement irrelevant.
Nor can we appeal to innate tendencies.
Even if we can be shown to have an innate predisposition to find Q good
that wouldn't show Q has objective goodness.
It would just indicate we're innately predisposed to value Q subjectively.
We may value life.
But sliding from "I value life" to "life has objective value"
makes the same mistake as sliding from "I find slugs revolting"
to "slugs are intrinsically revolting".
It's falsely projecting our own attitude onto the object of our attitude.
As Mackie explains, our wants and demands give rise to the notion of objective values
by reversing the direction of dependence
so that instead of seeing our evaluation of a thing's goodness depend on our desire
our desire for a thing is seen to depend on the thing's goodness.
Saying intuition lets us 'know' what's morally good or bad also needs to be challenged.
The weaker claim that moral intuition is a kind of instinctive judgment can be granted.
It's true that instinctive feelings
can lead us to judge actions immoral without conscious reasoning.
Empathy, for example, leads us quickly to apprehend the distress of a child being attacked
and a moral judgment may arrive in our awareness almost instantly.
Our brains process information rapidly and it's
easy to see how having protective instincts
came to give us an advantage while trying to survive together on a hostile planet.
But having useful, advantageous instincts
isn't evidence that we're accessing objective moral knowledge.
We do well to treat our intuitions with more caution.
They frequently mislead us.
Contrary to appearances, these squares aren't moving
which you can test by pausing the video
but we seem hardwired to make a false interpretation.
Much of what we discover about ourselves and the world is counter-intuitive.
For example, we tend to care and donate more
when charities show us cases of single rather than mass suffering.
In a fascinating article looking at this 'identifiable victim effect'
Paul Slovic notes how we're generally less affected
as the number of victims presented to us increases
and discusses the unsettling implications this has for our moral tendencies.
Sometimes, what one intuits to be self-evidently morally bad
another intuits to be self- evidently morally neutral.
If they each appeal to intuition, this only tells us they each 'know' they're right.
To make a valid case, they need to do more.
The subjective experience of believing a thing to be so obvious as to require no explanation
is not self-guaranteeing, and this is especially true with morality
where people are prone to mistaking feelings for moral knowledge.
While intuition might be a source of useful questions
our brains are too error-prone to regard it as a reliable source of objective answers.
Moving to moral duties
when Craig says, "To say we have objective moral duties
is to say we have certain moral obligations regardless of whether we think we do"
this is a concept with similar empirical and conceptual problems.
If absolutely no one is aware of a duty to do X
the idea of having such a duty gets no purchase.
Again, there's no problem saying that given better information
justifications based on false understanding get eliminated
while new justifications will emerge.
If the members of society X are generally protective of others
but mistake mental disorder for demon possession, which they see as a threat
they may feel a moral duty consistent with these attitudes
namely a duty to destroy the perceived threat.
If they outgrow their belief in possession and learn about brain dysfunction
they may feel a new duty: to care for those with mental disorder.
It's not that they discover a hitherto unknown objective duty
to help rather than harm these people.
It's that, given an initially protective attitude
their sense of duty changes in response to changes in information.
As before, much of the sense of what we ought to do may come initially from instinct
rather than conscious reasoning.
Again, empathic instincts influence much of our behaviour
and it's easy to see how this instinct would evolve;
how natural selection would favour groups of
humans whose instinct was to protect each other
over individuals trying to survive on a hostile planet with no one to protect them.
But as before, having advantageous instincts that motivate us
to behave or stop behaving a certain way isn't evidence that we have objective duties.
In the eighteenth century, David Hume objected to the way authors on morality
shifted from statements connected by 'is' or 'is not'
to others connected by 'ought' or 'ought not', which he said "express a new relation".
To Hume, it seemed inconceivable that 'ought' relationships were deducible from 'is' ones
which he saw as "entirely different".
This is commonly interpreted to mean we can't infer what we morally ought to do
from purely factual premises; we can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.
But further reading gives a different emphasis.
Here's what Hume says about wilful murder:
"The vice entirely escapes you as long as you consider the object.
You never find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast
and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action.
Here is a matter of fact: but 'tis the object of feeling.
It lies in yourself, not in the object."
In other words, evil isn't a feature of murder but a judgment arising from sentiment.
When Hume objects to the shift from 'is' to 'ought'
he's criticising those who mistake their own feelings about murder
for intrinsic qualities of murder, echoing the aforementioned error
of projecting one's own attitude onto the object of that attitude.
Of course, whatever Hume's original meaning, the idea that we can't derive moral oughts
from factual 'is' statements has spawned a great deal debate in our own time.
But is the so-called 'is-ought problem' really a problem?
All it's saying is that moral obligations aren't deducible purely from nonmoral facts.
This seems quite true if moral obligations involve emotional elements.
I don't like pain.
My dislike of pain isn't arbitrary; I'm biologically biased to dislike it.
Indeed, the aversive quality of pain protects us
by prompting our retreat from harmful stimuli.
Knowing also that I've no valid basis for thinking my comfort is uniquely important
if I want others not to hurt me, then to avoid hypocrisy, this obliges me not to hurt them.
This obligation isn't unconditional.
It arises largely from biologically influenced preferences.
Some say preference has no role in our morality.
After all, rapists like raping but we don't say they ought to rape.
But of course, that's misleading.
Morality has never meant doing whatever you prefer, no matter who it hurts.
Part of morality's essence is considering our impact on others
and asking why rapists shouldn't do what they prefer
completely ignores the preference of the victim.
No one's saying all preferences are morally relevant.
But some are.
We have numerous moral prohibitions about inflicting pain.
That our dislike of pain is a preference doesn't diminish its relevance.
When we dissect any moral obligation, we always find some element of preference
even if it's a preference largely determined by biology.
As Mackie notes, for any argument that "supports some evaluative conclusion
where this conclusion has some action-guiding force
that is not contingent upon desires or purposes or chosen ends...
somewhere in the input to this argument
there will be something which cannot be objectively validated
some premise which is not capable of being simply true
or some form of argument which is not valid as a matter of general logic
whose authority or cogency is not objective".
Craig claims that "If God does not exist
there is no ground for objective moral duties because there is no moral lawgiver"
the implication being that a lawgiver could provide that ground.
But this is false.
Lawgivers are still subjective beings, and their presence doesn't guarantee objectivity.
Even if a divine lawgiver required certain duties of us
all that would be necessarily true is that it required duties of us.
It wouldn't follow that the duties were therefore objectively good or grounded.
Craig thinks he can achieve objective grounding
by making use of Anselm of Canterbury's notion of a greatest conceivable being.
According to Anselm's ontological argument
one can understand what's meant by 'a greatest conceivable being'
so such a being can exist at least in thought.
But if it exists only in thought
one can think of a greater being: existing in thought and reality.
Therefore, Anselm insists, if one claims to be able to conceive of a greatest being
without ascribing to it real existence, one is contradicting oneself.
He later inflates this being to one not only that exists
but whose non-existence is inconceivable.
Of the well-known flaws in this argument, perhaps the most basic
is that even if Person A has in her mind a concept of a 'greatest conceivable being'
no logic requires her concept to correspond with reality.
As Kant points out, whatever and however much our concept of an object may contain
we must go outside the concept if we're to attribute the object with existence.
No ontological argument establishes that there must be a god
that this god must have an essential nature, or that that essential nature must be good.
Which leaves Craig's claim to objective grounding no more than the unsupported assertion
of a god and of the qualities Craig wants it to have to make his moral case.
We value generosity, compassion and fairness
because we experience and appreciate their positive effects.
When they're proclaimed as divine qualities
this isn't because anyone has observed such qualities in a god.
No god has yet been established to exist, let alone one whose nature we can study.
All that's happening is that qualities we've already judged independently to have value
are being ascribed to an entity declared to exist, and to be good by definition.
If we want to imagine an idealised being
as a way of developing some basic principles of conduct
the most appropriate model would be something with human biology.
Rooting morality in a being beyond our comprehension
only pushes morality beyond our comprehension.
It's even worse when what we choose as a model is a god of ancient scripture
depicted violating moral principles we hold to be most basic.
When we tell ourselves there's an all-powerful entity that can do this
yet still be morally perfect
we create the very conditions that - far from leading us to moral 'truth' -
guarantee our moral confusion.
Even if a god created our universe
nothing about the act or power of grand creation requires moral perfection.
And even if our universe was created by a god that was somehow intrinsically good
no logic would require that being still to exist.
Imagine such a god existed yesterday but destroyed itself today.
Would torture suddenly stop being a moral issue?
If so, this god could not have embodied values of enduring relevance
severing any connection with objective moral value.
If not, we're admitting the god doesn't need to exist
destroying this moral argument's conclusion.
There would be equally overwhelming problems
with claiming that moral values and duties are transcendental in nature
and therefore require a supernatural creator.
As soon as we require things to be imbued supernaturally
with goodness, badness or 'oughtness'
as soon as we allow the supernatural to feature in any of our explanations
the idea of a single supreme deity
becomes just one of countless unknowable, untestable concepts
all with their own ad hoc justifications.
In a video I made with TheraminTrees called 'Betting on infinity'
we look at what those floodgates let in.
In this case, transcendental values and duties could just as easily be the creation
of a group of supernatural experimenters arbitrarily making things good and bad
so as to study the effect on animal behaviour.
If moral values and duties were the kinds of
things that had to be created supernaturally
this alone would count against their objective validity.
A perennial problem with arguments for divine existence
is that even if they were valid, they still wouldn't provide a logical pathway
to the god of any particular religion or scripture.
Reviewing this moral argument, the implication of Premise 1
that the existence and only the existence of one god
could ground moral objectivity is not established.
Not only do objective values and duties lack necessary support
we've good reason to reject these concepts as incoherent
leaving Premise 2 and therefore the conclusion undemonstrated.
This moral argument does not establish the existence of any god.
The motive for objectifying moral values and duties is understandable.
As Mackie notes, since "We need morality to regulate interpersonal relations..."
[often against people's natural inclinations]
"...we therefore want our moral judgments to be authoritative"
and many think only objectivity can achieve this authority.
In the words of Thomas Nagel: "There is a tendency
to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality.
But often what appears to a more subjective point of view
cannot be accounted for in this way."
The common misconception that if morality isn't entirely objective
it's subjective and therefore "only opinion" or arbitrary
has obscured and hijacked much of the discourse on the subject and should be discarded.
In video four, building on themes in previous videos
I'll be discussing the origins and components of a more rounded morality
relevant to theists and non-believers alike
and this will include a look at utility, rules and consequences.