Groundless Morals

Here, I talk about whether you need God to ground morality. No, you don’t.*

This was a book chapter commenting on a debate between William Lane Craig (arguing that we need God to ground morality) and Erik Wielenberg (arguing for a secular moral realism).

[ *Based on: “Groundless Morals,” pp. 149-65 in A Debate on God and Morality, William Lane Craig and Erik J. Wielenberg (authors), Adam Lloyd Johnson (ed.) (Routledge, 2021). ]

1. The Theistic Account of Morality

1.1. Lack of objectivity

Craig and Wielenberg both want to account for objective morality. However, Craig’s divine command theory of duties fails to do so. It makes moral duties dependent on the attitudes of an observer, albeit an unusual one (God), which makes it a form of subjectivism.

The view is aptly so characterized because it is more similar to other subjectivist/relativist views than it is to views that make morality completely independent of all observers, like physical facts.

1.2. Lack of foundation

Craig’s view also doesn’t really explain morality as he supposes. Craig defines God to be good, but this doesn’t explain why there is goodness, any more than I would explain why mass exists by defining “massites” as objects that have mass and asserting that massites exist.

The divine command theory also doesn’t explain obligation since it doesn’t explain why we should obey God.

• If you say we should obey God to avoid punishment, that gives us a prudential reason but not a moral reason.

• If you say it’s because God knows what is right and would never command anything that wasn’t right, then you’re presupposing that there are already facts about right and wrong not grounded in God’s will.

• If you say it’s because God commands us to obey him, that’s circular.

• If you say it’s just a brute, inexplicable fact that we should obey God, then I can just as well say it’s just a brute, inexplicable fact that you should keep promises, respect other people’s rights, avoid harming people unnecessarily, etc.

1.3. Moral absurdity

Craig’s theory implies that if there were no God, or if God just remained silent about child torture, then it would be perfectly alright to torture children. This seems absurd. If we’re going to say things like that, then we’re disregarding ethical intuitions in a fundamental way. In that case, I don’t know why we’d believe in morality at all.

2. The Secular Account

There really aren’t any serious problems for secular accounts of objective morality.

2.1. Platonism

There are abstract objects called “universals”. These are things that multiple particulars can have in common; e.g., yellowness is something that the sun and lemons have in common. These universals exist necessarily; if nothing was yellow, there would still be a way that things could have been, namely, yellow.

This is the Platonist view. Craig implies that this is mysterious and problematic, but he doesn’t identify anything specific that’s wrong with it, and I don’t count “weirdness” as an objection. I think the view is trivially true.

Basic ethical truths obtain in virtue of relationships between universals. E.g., the truth that pain is bad obtains in virtue of the relationship between the universals painfulness and badness. Humans sometimes grasp universals, which enables them to see such relationships.

2.2. Objectivity without God

How can morality be objective without God? I don’t understand this question. It is like the bizarre question, “How can physics be objective without God?” I suppose the answer is, “By not constitutively depending on the attitudes of observers.” As to “how” it fails to constitutively depend on the attitudes of observers, I don’t know what that means, either for physics or for morality.

2.3. The source of morality

Where does morality come from? Again, this question makes no sense to me. It is like the question, “Where does the fact that 2 is less than 3 come from?” It doesn’t “come from” anywhere; that’s just a category error. 2 is necessarily less than 3, and nothing could have caused that fact. Similarly, pain is necessarily intrinsically bad, and nothing could have caused that fact.

These kinds of question are just presupposing that subjectivism is obviously true, then demanding a reason why it wouldn’t be. But there’s no reason for starting out assuming subjectivism.

2.4. How things know what properties to have

Craig wondered about how moral properties “know” which concrete situations to attach themselves to. Again, this question makes no sense. It is like the question, “How do objects know to be colored whenever they are yellow?” No knowledge is required for things to obey necessary truths.

3. Miscellaneous Issues

3.1. A methodological caution

Craig tends to throw out claims about many different, complex, highly fraught philosophical issues, then use them to support his main contention. E.g., he uses his views about free will, the mind/body problem, the ontological argument, etc., to support his main theses in the debate.

This is methodologically bad because there is no time to seriously evaluate all those huge issues. You could only evaluate them in an extremely superficial and bias-prone way.

Anyway, here are some remarks about why I was unconvinced by Craig’s claims about these things.

3.2. Mind, body, and free will

I agree with Craig about mind/body dualism and free will (that we have it). Briefly, I accept arguments like those of Frank Jackson, Thomas Nagel, and John Searle for dualism. I also think the denial of free will is self-defeating.

Wielenberg is a physicalist, which rules out the existence of God right away (I don’t suppose God could be a physical object). My view of the mind in principle is consistent with there being a God. I just don’t find that there is sufficient evidence to show that there is such a being.

3.3. Plantinga’s argument

Plantinga claimed that naturalism (or atheism) is self-defeating, because evolution could have designed us to have reproductive success without accurate beliefs, and we have no evidence against this; hence, we can’t trust any of our belief-forming mechanisms to be reliable; hence, we couldn’t trust any of our beliefs if we accept naturalism.

I accept Christopher Stephens’ reply to Plantinga. Basically, you can imagine corresponding adjustments to any given belief/desire pair so that you still get adaptive behavior with a false belief. But that will generally mess up the organism’s behavior when that same false belief gets paired with other desires, or is used in reasoning to other beliefs. It really isn’t that easy to see how evolution could systematically give you inaccurate yet adaptive beliefs across a wide range of circumstances.

3.4. Evolutionary debunking

Craig mentions evolutionary debunking arguments, which suggest that there is no particular reason to think evolution would have given us accurate moral beliefs, even if it gave us accurate descriptive beliefs.

I have responded to this elsewhere. Briefly, I think the view of moral beliefs as adaptations fails to account for how moral beliefs have developed over time in a certain direction. Across societies, people have been converging toward broadly liberal values. This process resembles how beliefs in all other subjects have improved and converged over time. Rather than viewing moral beliefs as adaptations, I think a better view is that they are byproducts of general intelligence and rationality.

3.5. The ontological argument

Craig briefly alluded to the Ontological Argument, which claims that the definition of “God” guarantees that God exists. God is supposed to be defined as “the greatest conceivable being” or “a supremely perfect being” or something like that. One then claims that greatness/perfection implies existence (it’s greater or more perfect to exist than not to exist).

I have a post about this. Briefly, I think the argument is confused about what definitions can accomplish. A definition can only stipulate that if a given word (or concept) applies to something, then that thing must have the characteristics listed in the definition. So the def. of God could guarantee that if “God” applies to anything, then that thing must be the greatest conceivable thing, or be supremely perfect, or whatever. But it can’t guarantee that “God” does apply to anything. Atheists would just deny that there is anything to which the word “God” properly applies.

4. Conclusion

Wielenberg wins. Theism can’t provide a foundation for objective morality, since theistic accounts of morality are a form of subjectivism. They also don’t really provide a foundation, since they don’t explain why we should obey God. They also lead to absurdities, such as that if God remained silent about baby-torture, then baby-torture would be okay.

In fact, Wielenberg conceded too much: he conceded that there were difficult questions for his view and that it was merely the least bad view. But I did not even see any difficult questions or problems for secular morality. I haven’t seen anything substantive that’s wrong with Platonism. The questions about “how” morality can be objective, “where it comes from”, and “how things know” what moral properties to have just don’t make any sense to me. They are like parallel questions about mathematical truths, which no one finds sensible.