If appeals to God get ruled out, either by disbelief in his existence or reluctance to rely upon it, says Matthew O’Brien then it isn’t possible to demonstrate that there are moral absolutes.
If you are going to make a moral argument, whether in the seminar room or in the public square, people today expect you to avoid invoking God. Atheists and theists alike share this expectation, with atheists eager to show that their moral knowledge and action are uncompromised by disbelief in God’s existence, and theists eager to establish the rational credentials of their moral convictions and protect themselves against charges of fideism. This expectation is unwarranted, however, because God’s existence is directly relevant to moral knowledge and action: If appeals to God get ruled out, either by disbelief in His existence or reluctance to rely upon it, then it isn’t possible to demonstrate that there are moral absolutes.
December 13th, 2011 | 2:31 pm
Is God Necessary for Explaining Moral Absolutes?
Apparently not according to Derek Parfit.
December 13th, 2011 | 3:15 pm
Do moral absolutes have any meaning beyond humans? In other words, when you take an absolute like “killing for reasons other than defense or food is wrong”, its not applied to non-humans. No one says cats who kill mice for play are evil. If humans didn’t exist (or some alien that is enough like a human to apply morality too), would moral absolutes be able to exist? What would they be or mean?
December 13th, 2011 | 3:46 pm
This question of moral absolutes is a subset of the argument between the
- “new natural law” of those like John Finnis (and apparently Christopher Tollefson) who argue that a coherent moral theory of natural law is possible while prescinding from the question of God’s role in generating that law,
and on the other hand,
– the “old natural law” of those (such as Russell Hittinger) who argue that
this effort is incoherent and will fail without a divine foundation for the theory.
It’s an interesting debate because both schools of thought defend almost exactly the same ultimate moral conclusions.
Part of the difference is that the “new school” seems to think that prescinding from the question of God’s role in the natural law makes it more legitimate and palatable as a wellspring for defending traditional morality in public policy debates in a secular, pluralistic society.
I don’t claim to be an expert, but having read quite a bit of this debate, I think the “old school” has the better of the argument. But both schools have offered some very interesting approaches to disputed questions.
December 13th, 2011 | 4:28 pm
No.
Something must be taken on faith, but it does not necessarily have to be the existence of God.
December 13th, 2011 | 4:51 pm
Following up on Sallyr, maybe we could look at it this way: There are a lot of effects I recognize without necessarily understanding or even recognizing their causes.
The natural moral law written in our hearts is one of those effects. Do I have to recognize its cause (or Cause) in order to recognize its content?
I don’t think so (agreeing with the “new natural law”). However, merely knowing the content of the moral law is not enough to acknowledge its authority as LAW. In order to do that, you have to acknowledge a legitimate Lawgiver (agreeing with the “old natural law”).
So the question revolves around the meaning of the title question, especially “Explaining Moral Absolutes.” If it means explaining in the sense of pointing out the moral laws arising out of our rational natures, then it is not necessary to invoke God. If it means explaining in the sense of showing why the moral laws are actually binding on us as humans, then the legitimacy of the Lawgiver (and His existence) has to be an ultimate part of the explanation.
For the purposes of practical politics, maybe the “new natural law” explanation is enough. For example, murder is wrong because it violates the nature of the one murdered and because it violates the rational nature of the murderer. At this level, is it necessary to invoke God?
December 13th, 2011 | 6:23 pm
Here is what I would say to someone who believes that moral absolutes can be built on a foundation of reason without any proscription from a higher (read “divine”) authority. The fundamental underlying assumption of any such argument is that decisions reached through reason “should” be privileged. Sez who? I’m not being facetious. What gives force to that “should.” It is far from clear to me that anything does.
December 13th, 2011 | 8:02 pm
Parfit? C’mon.
No one has successfully answered Nietzche, they just ignore him, or wish him away.
Of course God is necessary for explaining moral absolutes. Everybody knows that.
December 13th, 2011 | 9:33 pm
For example, murder is wrong because it violates the nature of the one murdered and because it violates the rational nature of the murderer. At this level, is it necessary to invoke God?
My question here is that this presumes a person exists who can murder. As I pointed out, we don’t think that cats murder mice. If you say something is a moral absolute, then that implies to me that it transcends humanity. Yet does murder apply to anything other than humanity? Before any humans existed was murder a moral absolute?
December 13th, 2011 | 10:22 pm
Although I believe in God, he’s not necessary to provide a justification for morality. All one need is proper reasoning (as well as a good heart), and if one, makes proper deductions about morality, that ultimately are based on self evident axioms, then God is superfluous.
December 13th, 2011 | 10:55 pm
quote: “For the purposes of practical politics, maybe the “new natural law” explanation is enough. For example, murder is wrong because it violates the nature of the one murdered and because it violates the rational nature of the murderer. At this level, is it necessary to invoke God?”
I reply – I think there’s a difference between “explaining” moral absolutes and actually abiding by them when it looks completely self-defeating and absurd to abide by them.
The decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was certainly reasonable at some level, and can be defended as avoiding even worse suffering and death. I don’t believe that Truman and the armed forces did not understand the concept that murder is wrong, and that dropping the atom bomb on a civilian population was murder. They just thought they were justified in doing it, and that failing to do it would be absurd in costing more lives and suffering.
I’m not sure if the additional idea (that God himself is offended by murder, and that one is accountable to him in the end) would have been sufficient to avoid the decision to drop the atom bomb. But it would at least make it harder to declare that abiding by the moral absolute against murder is absurd.
December 14th, 2011 | 4:17 am
In her famous 1954 paper, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Miss Anscombe argued that, without a Lawgiver, one cannot have a Law theory of morality and that the idea of the “moral ought,” becomes meaningless. “Obligation,” (being bound) is, after all, a specifically legal concept. The notion of “legislating for oneself” is simple to absurd to merit discussion.
For her, the alternative is to adopt something like Aristotle’s Virtue theory of morality: moral conduct is what promotes human flourishing, but, for that, we need an agreed concept of human nature, which, manifestly, we do not. This, by the by, is the great weakness of the New Natural Law school.
The deontological ethics of Kant she dismisses in a couple of sentences; her most telling objection being that “His own rigoristic convictions on the subject of lying were so intense that it never occurred to him that a lie could be relevantly described as anything but just a lie (e.g. as “a lie in such-and-such circumstances”). His rule about universalizable maxims is useless without stipulations as to what shall count as a relevant description of an action with a view to constructing a maxim about it.”
The result has been that modern moral philosophy has become wholly “consequentialist” (a term she coined in this paper) and has abandoned moral absolutes.
December 14th, 2011 | 8:28 am
I tend toward the idea that the “godless” natural-law argument would ultimately fail to persuade, though I hope I’m wrong on this.
One bit of evidence that I might be wrong is the story of C S Lewis’ conversion. What brought him out of atheism was his conviction (clearly without the assumption of a Lawgiver) that the natural law is binding. From there he reasoned there must be a Lawgiver.
He might not have reached that final step. My point is that the natural law in itself was persuasive to him, prior to his rejection of atheism.
December 14th, 2011 | 8:42 am
Utilitarianism has (rightly) fallen into disrepute lately, but it provides at least a framework for defining morality without recourse to an appeal to the supernatural.
Define “moral conduct” as “that which contributes to the greatest benefit of the greatest number.” Obviously, we have to worry about what qualifies as “beneficial” but some propositions, like “dying right now instead of twenty years hence is not beneficial to most people” are pretty hard to argue with.
Then things like poisoning the water supply are inherently “immoral.”
The question is important because in a pluralistic society, people can’t be expected to agree about the supernatural. On the other hand, beyond obvious things like poisoning the water supply, the utilitarian approach is hard to apply in practice.
December 14th, 2011 | 10:21 am
Michael PS –
Some duties one accepts passively – e.g. the duties of citizenship, by not emigrating. Some duties one accepts voluntarily – e.g. enlisting in the armed forces. How is the latter not “legislating for oneself”?
December 14th, 2011 | 11:53 am
Can it be maintained that morality is objective (even God-given) without maintaining that there are “moral absolutes”? If we take the commandment against bearing false witness to absolutely prohibit lying, then it is wrong to lie to the Nazis and tell them you are not hiding Anne Frank. (Opinion is divided on this, of course.) As I understand Catholic though, the command not to steal is not absolute in that a starving person can steal to stay alive or feed his starving family. Murder is “intrinsically wrong,” but many kinds of killing are permitted (legal execution, killing on the battlefield, self-defense), so in some way it seems to me that murder has to be defined as something like “wrongful killing,” which is difficult to regard as the definition of a moral absolute, because of course wrongful killing is wrong. A commandment against murder does not actually tell you what kind of killing is wrong and what kind is acceptable. It tells you that wrongful killing is wrong, which by definition it has to be. The command against stealing is much the same, since stealing isn’t defined, and therefore must be regarded as “wrongfully taking something that does not belong to you.” Catholics consider abortion to be intrinsically wrong, but not every medical intervention that results in the removal or death of a fetus is considered an abortion (for example, removing the part of the fallopian tube with the embryo attached in cases of ectopic pregnancy, removing a cancerous uterus of a pregnant woman).
Many things that are prohibited are not prohibited absolutely, it seems to me.
December 14th, 2011 | 1:22 pm
There are moral absolutes the same way there are mathematical absolutes. Morality is simply a system of principles that effect human flourishing as well as conscious entities in general. Suppose there were only 2 conscious entities in the universe — that would greatly simplify many moral questions. Without conscious entities, discussing morality would make as much sense as discussing computer security in the 1500s. Certainly morality is complex, but that doesn’t mean you have to have God to define it. Consider the question, “how many hydrogen atoms are there is the sun”. We don’t know the exact answer to that question, nor do we have the means of getting it. That doesn’t mean the question doesn’t have an answer, and that we can’t rule out wrong answers. If somebody answered “42 atoms”, we’d know that was wrong.
Introducing God into the equation makes the job much harder, not easier. We have to first explain the moral atrocities attributed to God in the Bible, such as the flood. Then we have to ask questions such as if God is subject to his own moral code? And if so, is this moral code higher than God? If he isn’t subject, then you’re just saying something is moral because God says it is.
December 15th, 2011 | 12:24 am
With respect to the need for God to explain moral absolutes, one might question why God would command some in the Bible to kill innocents, in the Old Testement, and then command the rest of us to nver kill innocents. There seems to be a relativism here, that i’ve been unable to reconcile.
December 15th, 2011 | 11:07 am
Where does the “common morality of Judeo-Christians” dismiss the possibility of Tragic Dilemmas as the author says? It may tell how one is supposed to resolve them but they are still dilemmas and still tragic.
December 15th, 2011 | 1:03 pm
Ray Ingles,
What you are doing is describing the conditions under which an obligation is incurred.
In a law theory of ethics, what obliges is the divine law – as rules oblige in a game. How the rules apply to a given set of facts is another question.
That is quite different to the claim to legislate for oneself i.e. draw up the rules for oneself.
December 15th, 2011 | 4:31 pm
What you are doing is describing the conditions under which an obligation is incurred.
In a law theory of ethics, what obliges is the divine law – as rules oblige in a game. How the rules apply to a given set of facts is another question.
That is quite different to the claim to legislate for oneself i.e. draw up the rules for oneself.
But that is exactly what today’s humanists are arguing: that laws do not apply if a person does not accept them.
I have known people who think of themselves as not only moral and good, but as good citizens. But they feel no shame at all about circumventing laws they don’t agree with. They honestly believe that the fact that the law is “wrong” (in their own opinion) means the law is not valid.
Civil disobedience* –> reductio ad absurdum
Unfortunately, they are not quite able to reconcile the fact that, if this were true, it would apply equally to Christians and conservatives as well.
___
*Civil disobedience does not necessarily lead to such an absurd conclusion if one recognizes constraints. Problem is, if you have a disputed boundary (“who decides what a just law is?”), you’re also going to have a dispute over the boundary resolution process (“under what conditions or circumstances is civil disobedience justified?”)
December 15th, 2011 | 5:15 pm
Dear Blake: One good aspect of natural law ethics is that it does spell out, for the most part, when disobedience of civil laws is justified or even required. It’s not necessarily a situation of “Who decides what a just law is?” which implies a power play, but rather “How might we recognize justice?” which implies a cognitive process available to all.
So even if folks, as per your description, bring up these issues, I still think natural law has a preliminary answer for them without explicitly having to spell out its divine provenance.
December 15th, 2011 | 8:44 pm
Dear Blake: One good aspect of natural law ethics is that it does spell out, for the most part, when disobedience of civil laws is justified or even required. It’s not necessarily a situation of “Who decides what a just law is?” which implies a power play, but rather “How might we recognize justice?” which implies a cognitive process available to all.
So even if folks, as per your description, bring up these issues, I still think natural law has a preliminary answer for them without explicitly having to spell out its divine provenance.
As I said – you have to take something for granted.
There can be no argument at all unless everyone agrees on some fundamentals.
But today’s humanists aren’t. You can’t even get them to agree to something as simple as one standard, applied equally, because they genuinely believe they are smarter, “more right”, better, elite, and deserving of different and better treatment than “people in flyover country”.
If you accept natural law – and you have an agreement about what that means – then sure, no problem.
But why should anyone believe in natural law if they don’t believe in the divine (in whatever form)? There is only one reason: because they choose to – because for some reason it suits them to do so.
December 15th, 2011 | 9:17 pm
incredible. I never thought I’d see someone argue “moral absolutes are well-defined because I define them as such.”
anyway, this question has been answered in the affirmative for centuries. its pithiest expression I know of is found in the voice of dymitri karamazov, “without immortality, everything is permitted.”
as far as I’ve seen, any argument to the contrary, including the ones in this thread, can be restated as argument by assertion.
best,
kristan
December 15th, 2011 | 11:00 pm
I don’t think this problem is going to be resolved any time soon…but I suspect the resolution lies in the distinction made between objective and subjective. The quest here for moral absolutes seems to be a quest for objectivity…..the way theorems in geometry are objective. You may know them, you may be ignorant of them, you may have known them and forgotten, but they lay ‘out there’ totally independent of you want, think or know about them.
But subjectivity gets a lot of unjust bashing. The fact is, its an objective fact that all of us live our lives subjectively. Subjectivity is, objectively, as aspect of the universe so any ‘universal’ needs to incorporate it, not try to keep it apart. Hence unlike geometry, there’s a lot of thrashing around and griping. Blake complains, “There can be no argument at all unless everyone agrees on some fundamentals….But today’s humanists aren’t. You can’t even get them to agree to something as simple as one standard…” As if everyone agreed on one standard last year, last decade, or even two thousand years ago. You should have sold that tonic back before Christianity split into 1,000+ different denominations…
because they genuinely believe they are smarter, “more right”, better, elite, and deserving of different and better treatment than “people in flyover country”.
Actually if they really believed this then they would agree on something ‘fundamental’. What’s ironic is that you probably don’t even see that you’re no less elitist than the imaginary people you complain about.
December 16th, 2011 | 1:35 pm
I am coming late to this discussion, but the topic provokes my interests and I would like to make a few observations.
A preliminary observation is that we must distinguish moral ontology—do objective morals exist—from moral epistemology—how do we discover objective morals. Some questions of moral epistemology can be exceedingly difficult. For example, was it moral to drop the bomb on Hiroshima? Our struggles with such questions of moral epistemology, however, are separate from our struggles with questions of moral ontology—are there objectively correct answer to such questions.
Boonton makes the point that “the quest here for moral absolutes seems to be a quest for objectivity…..the way theorems in geometry are objective.” This is an important observation. The axioms of geometry have the quality of being necessarily true—that it is logically impossible to conceive of a world in which they are not true. For example, if we define a circle as a collection of points equal distance from the center, then the value of pi must necessarily take on a certain value. It is logically incoherent to speak of worlds in which the value of pi varied.
The question then is whether moral values have the quality of being necessarily true in the same way that theorems of geometry have the quality of being necessarily true—it would be logically incoherent to speak of a world that is otherwise.
If moral values are rooted in the character of God, then I think the answer is yes—moral values are necessary truths. I would define God as the greatest conceivable being, which would necessarily include the quality of moral perfection. If a God thus defined actually exists, then objective moral values necessarily flow from his character of moral perfection.
I would note that the existence of a God such as Zeus will not do. It has to be a God who is the greatest conceivable being. I would also note whether the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish God exists and is such a God is a question for another day.
This brings us to the ultimate question: if God (thus defined) does not exist, do moral values have the quality of being necessarily true. Boonton suggests that the answer is yes, arguing that “something must be taken on faith, but it does not necessarily have to be the existence of God.” I think his position is along the lines of Brett Lythgoe’s suggestion that, “All one need is proper reasoning (as well as a good heart), and if one, makes proper deductions about morality, that ultimately are based on self evident axioms, then God is superfluous.”
I don’t think this argument works, however, because I can imagine a world in which “self evident [moral] axioms” are different from those that exist in this world. I do not think that they have the quality of being necessarily true.
For example, imagine that the Nazis won World War II and either brainwashed everyone to believe that “Jews are evil and must be exterminated” or killed everyone who believed otherwise. In such a world, the remaining people who reasoned from self-evident moral axioms would deduce a very different set of moral values from the one’s we hold.
If the world is, in fact, just comprised of matter, space and energy, on what basis could one challenge the Nazi’s self-evident moral axioms. If we are merely the end result chance and natural selection, then why couldn’t the self-evident moral axioms we hold be different in a different world.
My last point is that it is not “faith” in God that grounds objective moral values. It has to be the existence of a God who is the greatest conceivable being. Similarly, mere “faith” in the existence of moral axioms will not do.
December 18th, 2011 | 7:58 am
pauld
The axioms of geometry have the quality of being necessarily true—that it is logically impossible to conceive of a world in which they are not true. For example, if we define a circle as a collection of points equal distance from the center, then the value of pi must necessarily take on a certain value. It is logically incoherent to speak of worlds in which the value of pi varied.
This seems to be true, but is hardly for sure. we know that some axioms may or may not be true ‘in the real world’. For example, between two points the short distance is a straight line. However if you have a point on the north pole and one one the south, you can draw as many different lines as you wish between them, provided your definition of a line would be one that encircles the globe.
And then there’s the issue that circles don’t really exist. At least not in our world. A circle is made up an infinite number of points. Yet any circle we draw will look like a pile of rubble under a powerful enough microscope. Physics tells us at the very, very, small level space ceases to be continuous. So pi exists only as an analogy. Its useful to use an approximate pi because if you’re designing a swimming pool that’s an approximate circle it’s helpfull. For absolute truth, though, isn’t reasoning by analogy more often than not a fallacy?
This brings us to the ultimate question: if God (thus defined) does not exist, do moral values have the quality of being necessarily true. Boonton suggests that the answer is yes, arguing that “something must be taken on faith, but it does not necessarily have to be the existence of God.”…
Actually that was Blake’s position. What I’m trying to get at is the odd fact that we are trying to get to absolute morality yet morality only seems to apply to humans….or relations that are like human relationships. For example, no one thinks tapeworms feeding off an animal are acting immorally. Yet a freeloader leaching off a gullible friend is seen as immoral. It’s easy to imagine circles in a universe without humans, it’s pretty hard to imagine morality in a universe lacking anything human in it.
If the world is, in fact, just comprised of matter, space and energy, on what basis could one challenge the Nazi’s self-evident moral axioms. If we are merely the end result chance and natural selection, then why couldn’t the self-evident moral axioms we hold be different in a different world.
Quite frankly because they aren’t. Do you think God could have made a universe where pi was some different number? You can assert that chance is too flimsy to base morality on but chance is only flimsy in individual transactions. The casino may win or loose a lot of money when you walk in the door, but as a whole the casino knows its going to make money. It’s quite possible to imagine ‘by chance’ a different world where Nazi’s won WWII. It’s also quite possible to imagine in such a world they would paint their destruction of the Jews as a very moral thing. But what are the chances that would really, really, work over time? Why wouldn’t future generations removed from the war start to question the morality of it? Start asking what had really been done and was it really right? It didn’t take that long for the USSR to start questioning what happened under Stalin. The US’s almost immediate romanticizing of Native Americans is, partially, I think the recognition that of the fact that its treatment of them wasn’t moral. I suspect the Nazi’s saw this too. Unlike Germany’s other programs, the jet fighters, the rockets, the autobahn and volkswagons the murder of the Jews was done ‘behind the scenes’ and in a manner that smacked of trying to get it done really so it would soon be too late to do anything to reverse it. In other words, they acted as though they knew future generations, whether or not Germany won the war, would have wanted to undo what they had done.
My last point is that it is not “faith” in God that grounds objective moral values. It has to be the existence of a God who is the greatest conceivable being. Similarly, mere “faith” in the existence of moral axioms will not do.
I think your key phrase here is ‘a God’…that leaves a real lot of room, a little bit too much room. Most common talk of God denotes a human like entity. By that I mean an entity that thinks, has opinions, even can have emotions. But I think the God required by your assertion can be much more abstract, much less a ‘personality’ and more as a ‘nature of things’.
Of course such a God can also have a ‘personality’, but what you’re saying doesn’t require it. And that leads me to ask is the bare min. God required by your assertion be enough of a God to justiy an atheist ceasing to call himself an atheist? Einstein once quipped that ‘God doesn’t play dice’ but the ‘God’ he was talking about was not the type of God that would justify rejecting atheism.
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