A Response to a Response to the Moral Argument

This post is simply a reposting of a response to a response to the moral argument that I thought was very good and ought to be shared. I’ll first show the response to the moral argument, which I thought was rather thorough, and the response that Matthew Flanagan, professional ethicist who runs a great blog, made to the response (see here: http://www.mandm.org.nz/). I may write a post on the moral argument in the future, but I will just say that I think that God grounds moral facts, but I am not sure which formulation of the argument I would accept. Without further ado, here is the post:

“The Moral Argument Against God is More Successful Than The Moral Argument for God!

What Are the Moral Moral Arguments?

All moral arguments for God take a format similar to:

1. There are objective moral facts.

2. God provides the best explanation of the existence of objective moral facts.

3. Therefore, (probably) God exists.

We can find an early example of this argument in Aquinas' Five Ways. More modern variations talk about the existence of moral obligations (see Robert Adams 1987) or the existence of moral awareness (see Richard Swinburne 2004).

A defender of the moral argument has to walk a tightrope. In defending Premise 1 they have had to fend off the non-cognitivist and anti-realist crowd and give arguments towards a realism. Then, in defending Premise 2, they have to go against the majority of moral realists by saying that God is the best explanation for a moral realism.

I want to pit this against another argument that I've come up with:

1. There are objective moral facts.

2. If God exists, then we would expect moral facts would be best explained by God.

3. Moral facts are not best explained by God.

4. Therefore, (probably) God does not exist.

Defending Against Anti-Realism

We're going to work backwards and begin with the task all realists have to undertake: defending themselves against the anti-realist position.

J. L. Mackie provides two famous arguments for Anti-Realism:

1. Argument from Moral Queerness

2. Argument from Moral Disagreement (1977)

The Argument from Moral Queerness makes two claims: moral facts, if they existed, consist of weird properties. These weird properties, the second claim says, would have to be understood through a weird mechanism. Put differently: "(A) that morality is centrally committed to some thesis X, and (B) that X is bizarre, ontologically profligate, or just too far-fetched to be taken seriously..." (Joyce 2016).

Is the theist committed to a thesis that is "bizarre, ontologically profligate, or too far-fetched to be taken seriously..."? They surely think not: the theist replies that God is not ontologically profligate and we have plenty of existence for non-naturalism through the existence of miracles and other arguments for God. We should not find this argument satisfactory because it is suspiciously close to Question Begging: it isn't all that clear to me how the theist can defend the normalness of non-naturalism without arguing elsewhere that God exists. At worst, the theist is using their conclusion to defend their argument, and at best the Moral Argument becomes superfluous.

The secular moral realist has a far more convincing answer to the Moral Queerness charge. They can claim moral facts are natural facts, and that there is nothing weird about natural facts.

The second argument is the Argument from Moral Disagreement. This argument goes that there is widespread disagreement on what our morals are and ought to be. This disagreement, unlike most disagreement, is intractable. Take two cultures with two different values. The realist will claim that they have different access and therefore come to form different beliefs. Some of these beliefs are false. Mackie argues it just makes more sense to say their moral beliefs result from their cultural and anthropological heritage. They do not have different access; they just have different (never true) beliefs.

The Argument from Moral Disagreement has been criticised heavily. There are three strands of criticism: (1) that the disagreement part of moral disagreement is heavily exaggerated. If we polled people, what would they say their morals comprise? Presumably that theft is often bad, as is murder. They might emphasize the family; on happiness and on fairness. If we take these to be moral claims, then it seems there is widespread agreement! (2) Disagreement doesn't seem to have weight on the truth of the matter. If you lacked the tools to calculate the shape of the Earth, but I had them, we would not conclude that the shape of the Earth is unknowable or nonsense. Finally, (3) cultures do not seem to have equal epistemic access. As cultures progress, their values align; why would we think Mackie is right in his assessment that his view is more parsimonious when we seem to experience moral progress with increased epistemic access?

It is not clear that the theist has access to all these outs. The Christian often says that the moral law is written on our hearts (Romans 2:14-15). How then can they use the argument from epistemic access? The theist often finds themselves defending increasing fringe moral views- for example on the subjugation of women or the permissibility of abortion. So how can they claim widespread agreement? It seems like the theist has worse criticisms of this argument than the non-theist.

There are other outs that can be shared: both have access to the Frege-Geach problem against specific anti-realisms (see Miller 2003/2013 for an endless discussion on modern arguments for/against Frege-Geach).

Do Arguments in the Modern Literature Need God?

While there isn't consensus in meta-ethics, moral realism is the majority position. About 56% of professional philosophers are moral realists, and only 25% of professional philosophers are anti-realists (PhilPapers Surveys). Most philosophers are also atheists. In this section, I want to show some secular arguments for moral realism and show they fares better than the religious argument we're going to look at.

The first argument we're going to look at made by realists are companion in guilt arguments. These arguments say that if we reject a moral realism, we have to reject realism about lots of other things we typically accept (and accept with good reason). Therefore, we ought not to reject realism. Typical the companions are epistemology, mathematics, the mind and sometimes philosophy itself; to reject facts about these is a tremendous bullet to bite that is both massively counter intuitive and has to run the gauntlet of rejecting many good arguments.

Terence Cuneo gives a version of such an argument in The Normative Web (2007). He gives his 'core' argument as:

1. If moral facts do not exist, then epistemic facts do not exist.

2. Epistemic facts exist.

3. So moral facts exist.

4. If moral facts exist, then moral realism is true.

5. So moral realism is true.

Cuneo sees his first premise as the most crucial (but defends premise 2 as well). The thrust of Cuneo's argument is that the epistemic facts have all the features that anti-realists think are problematic for moral facts. Cuneo defines epistemic facts as "facts to the effect that something has some such property as being justified or irrational or insightful or a case of knowledge." (Lenman 2008) He thinks there is a parity, for example, between the intrinsic motivation of moral reasons and epistemic reasons. Similarly, he thinks epistemic facts face the same apparent intractability of disagreement that morality supposedly faces. James Lenman's review is an excellent primer for Cuneo (2008).

For more of these arguments, see Russ Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism: A Defence (2003). This review is also a good primer (Lillehammer 2003). We will continue to use Cuneo's argument as a surrogate for all Companions-in-Guilt arguments.

Nothing in here requires an appeal to God. This generalist argument has wide access, and that is to its benefit. It also seems like nothing in Moral Intuitionism & Moral Non-Naturalism necessitates a God. The Open-Question, as another example, gives no reason to favour God over Secularism.

So let's take a look at the reason most theists defer to when defending the claim that God is required:

The Bad Argument from C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis argued that "conscience reveals to us a moral law whose source cannot be found in the natural world, thus pointing to a supernatural Lawgiver." I'm going to formalise this as I often see it given:

1. If moral laws exist, they require a moral lawgiver.

2. Moral laws exist.

3. A moral lawgiver exists.

4. The moral lawgiver is God.

There are many ways to attack this argument.

The first is to say that Divine Command Theory is not true. An astute reader will have noticed that the premises do not talk about moral facts: that is because this argument assumes that if moral facts exist, they exist as moral laws which render moral obligations. This excludes us from other normative systems. There are good reasons to dislike Divine Command Theory. The Euthyphro Dilemma seems a good starting place, and maybe theists do instead opt for a Virtue Ethicist account.

The Euthyphro Dilemma asks “Does God command this action because it is morally right, or is it morally right because God commands it?” If it is the first, it must worry us that there is a good independent of God and God merely recognises that God. Having a good external to God poses problems for most monotheisms. The second horn leaves open the possibility that cruelty could be morally right if God commanded it.

I think the Divine Command Theorist has some good responses: they can bite the bullet and admit that God could command cruelty (but never would) or they can insist on a telos. Biting the bullet is still difficult: to say that God could possibly command evil, but never would seems to detract from their omnipotence in a meaningful way. It is also difficult to bite the bullet because, as Anselm admits, he would not be willing to do something "evil" if God commanded it. The second response is to say that God designs us with a specific nature, and from that nature we can derive what is good and what is bad. These are not subject to change once our nature has been fixed and so God cannot arbitrarily command us towards Evil. However, this seems only to push the problem back: God could have built us with a nature geared towards extreme evil. This also seems to posit a telos based morality, which does not seem to require a lawgiver. This requires a new argument.

The IEP entry on this is excellent. Link here.

The second is to say that even if moral laws exist, they do not require a Godly moral lawgiver. There are multiple accounts of natural rights that are consistent with a naturalism or that our concept of moral laws comes from a Constructivism that does not necessitate a God (see Rawls' Veil of Ignorance for an extremely popular example).

Premise 1 of Lewis' argument is presented as intuitive, but we have good reasons to think this isn't the case. The first place to look is towards a constructivism - Metaethical constructivism is the view that insofar as there are normative truths, they are not fixed by normative facts that are independent of what rational agents would agree to under some specified conditions of choice. It seems like constructivism offers a coherent set of moral laws that don't require a God.

I am not arguing that Constructivism is true, but I argue that Lewis' argument is steadily losing that initial intuitive support. The theist's task is getting more and more daunting.

The third is to say that moral laws don't exist. We've seen other normative systems as one answer to this, but we also have the anti-realist position. I have also already argued that the theist is not as well equipped to deal with anti-realism as the atheist.

Running the Reverse

So where does this leave us?

In the moral argument for God, I've offered good reasons to think that God is not the best explanation for the existence of moral facts:

1. God-Given morals seem to fair worse against Moral Disagreement and Moral Queerness arguments.

2. Nearly all Moral Realist accounts in contemporary literature do not posit a God. This is consistent across different ontologies: neither popular non-naturalism nor popular naturalism appeal to God. In fact, injecting God in seems to give a worse explanation:

3. C.S. Lewis' argument that does posit the necessity of a God fails.

4. And this is all after we've admitted to a realism, which many people don't.

In fact, given 2 & 3 it seems like we can run the reverse argument:

1. There are objective moral facts.

2. If God exists, then we would expect moral facts would be best explained by God.

3. Moral facts are not best explained by God.

4. Therefore, (probably) God does not exist.

Conclusion

The Moral Argument sucks. It sucks so bad that I think a cursory analysis gives us good reason to think a reverse argument is successful. I'm curious to see some of the response.

I also wrote most of this in a stupor was because someone was nagging me to get it done. They were right.”

 

This was quite the response; in case you would like to see where this comes from, I’ll provide the link (see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/lu3h4y/the_moral_argument_against_god_is_more_successful/ - I know reddit is embarrassing, please forgive me). Clearly, the responder is not the biggest fan of the moral argument and comes off as someone who is well-read on the issue, but Flanagan’s response, I think, reveals that this is merely illusory:

“So, question 3 seems dubious to me. I don’t think anyone has shown that, say, a divine command theory is an implausible theory. I am reasonably confident I can defend this claim.

But there seems to me just a deeper issue here, which involves the criteria used to support (3). There are two desiderata involved in a good explanation of moral facts. The first is how well the theory accommodates the presuppositions, assumptions and platitudes implicit in our moral discourse and practise. This is called the “internal accommodation” project. The second is how well it accommodates our background philosophical world view, whether it is coherent with everything else we know about what the world is like, our ontology, our view on epistemology and so on. This is known as the external accommodation project. Most meta ethical theories involve trade offs between these projects.

Here is the thing: if you say Theistic theories are not good explanations of moral facts. Your saying they don’t meet these desiderata as well as secular theories do. But there is an obvious problem here, because, one desiderata is how well the theory accommodates *our* background world view. And Theists and naturalists will often have very different world views. Of course, something like a divine command theory will fail the external accommodation project of an atheist or naturalist. No matter how well it scores on internally accommodation it will have a very low prior probability on background evidence and so a theory that a secular theory which fails to score anywhere near as well may well be an overall better theory.

The problem is that if you accept (2) Your claiming that *If* God exists, then he would be the best explanation of moral facts. So the question here is whether, it is a good theory, if you grant that God exists. (3) However involves the atheist making a theory assessment which inevitably involves him assessing the theory against his background evidence which assumes God does not exist. There is something akin to begging the question here.

What needs to happen is that (3) needs to be assessed, against the background evidence of a typical theist. In other words, you need to ask, wether something like a divine command be the best theory if you granted Theism for the sake of argument. But then (3) needs a lot more work to defend. (3) should say something like this: If God exists then moral facts are not best explained by God.

I having skim-read the article, I disagree that it is “quite good” the author has three sections:

The first section suggests Theist cannot defend himself against Mackie’s queerness argument without “begging the question” and the atheist can defend himself against it by asserting that moral properties are natural properties.

This seems to me to just not really understand the problem. Mackie’s argument is essentially that moral facts cannot be accommodated within a naturalistic view of the world. Mackie argues that moral facts have certain features ( supervenient objective categorical authoritative prescriptivity) which mean they cannot be plausibly identified with natural properties which are discovered by empirical means. Because he assumes as a premise that naturalism is true. This argument entails moral properties do not exist.

Now, it is simply false that a Theist “begs the question” if he rejects this argument. The Theist doesn’t grant the premise of the argument, that naturalism is true. Pointing out that you don’t accept a premise of an argument isn’t begging the question.

Interestingly, Mackie himself accepted and was quite clear that his argument didn’t carry any weight against a Theist. He ended his book by saying that if God exists his argument can be avoided and Theists should read his argument as a conditional, about what we could say about morality if God did not exist. So the author seems to me just confused here.

By contrast, to simply assert that moral properties are natural does in this context beg the question, because the whole conclusion of Mackie’s argument is that moral properties cannot be accommodated in a naturalistic world view. The naturalist would need to actually argue that Mackie is wrong and provide reasons for thinking the features he highlights can be given a naturalistic reduction. That requires argument, not simply assertion.

The second section argues that one does not need God to explain morality. He gives three arguments. The first is an ad populum to the effect that many philosophers who are moral realists are not theists. But that obviously doesn’t tell us anything about whether the most adequate account of the natural moral properties entails or incorporates Theism. The fact a group of people believe A and don’t believe B doesn’t give us any indication of the explanatory relationship between A and B.

The second argument is to note Terrence Cuneo’s argument for the existence of moral facts. He notes Cuneo’s argument doesn’t mention God as a premise. This again misses the point, Cuneo’s argument is simply an argument that moral properties exist. The fact they exist and you can argue they exist does nothing to show that the best account of what they are doesn’t involve God. All moral realists whether naturalist, non-naturalist or supernaturalists accept that moral properties exist. That isn’t at issue, the question is what kind of property they are.

To see the problem here, suppose I noted that there are large numbers of people who can give me arguments for the existence of water without mentioning hydrogen. My son for example can point to the water in the bath and say “look there is water”. Would that lead anyone to conclude that the best account of what water is not that it is H20? No it would be irrelevant.

(Ironically, Cuneo himself is actually a Theist, and Cuneo believes that moral properties cannot be reduced to natural properties.)

The third argument is to note that Schafer Landau has defended a form of realism. This is true, Landau has, but nowhere in Landau's book does he provide any reasons for thinking that God is not the best explanation for morality. Landau’s book “Realism” is largely a defence of a secular non moral realism against objections from naturalists and opponents of realism. It doesn’t even address the question of whether supernaturalism is better nor does it even address the kind of objections supernaturalists raise.

The last section simply suggests the author has never even bothered to read any literature on divine command ethics. He starts off attributing a “bad argument” to C S Lewis, the problem is this isn’t the argument Lewis made.

Erik Wielenberg ( God and the Reach of Reason) has pointed out Lewis' argument was actually best understood as an abductive one, not a deductive “lawgiver” argument. The author ignores the much more detailed arguments along the same lines by people like Adam’s. So basically, attacks a straw man. It is very common to find the “lawgiver” argument discussed in texts where sceptics give very quick dismissals of divine command theories. What is a lot harder is finding this argument in any of the leading defences of divine command theories. You don’t find it in Adam’s or Evans’ or Hare, or Quinn etc.

The author then simply asserts the Euthyphro objection is successful. Despite the fact, there have been several significant critiques of this dilemma including one by Mackie in the book “Inventing Right and Wrong” the author quotes at the start of the post. He then gives two “apparent responses” the divine command theorist could make, none of which actually reflect the responses they actually have made as well as the responses various atheists have made such as Richard Joyce and John Mackie.

The post strikes me as someone who has just surveyed some online encyclopedia articles. His knowledge of Mackie seems to simply consist of a quote from Joyce in the Stanford article( and he doesn’t really understand the context where Joyce goes into more depth explaining the problem). He refers to Mackie but seems to not know what Mackie really argued or the fact Mackie addressed some of the Euthyphro style objections he cites. Similarly, he doesn’t seem to have read Landau because if he did he would know Landau says almost nothing about divine command ethics. He similarly doesn’t really understand Cuneo’s argument, which isn't an attempt to show you can have moral requirements without God.”

I think this response successfully refutes the response to the moral argument.