Recently I looked at Mere Christianity by CS Lewis in terms of his thoughts on sex. The plan was to look at Lewis’s argument for the existence of God* from objective morality. But then I realised that the modern Christian apologist William Lane Craig presents a very similar but simpler argument from morality. So, best to look at that one first. Here is Craig’s argument*, paraphrased but almost verbatim:
- Without God, objective morality wouldn’t exist
- But objective morality does exist (since we know murder is objectively wrong)
- Therefore God exists
Now, I happen to think even if there was a God, objective morality is still in trouble. This is ye olde Euthyphro dilemma: If morality is whatever God says, then how does God’s caprice make something objectively moral (or immoral)? If on the other hand morality is something outside of God, then adding God doesn’t help us explain objective morality (or even what it is).
Also if you think there IS an objective secular morality, you’ll write the whole argument off as nonsense because #1 above is false. But I’m taking a harder line, since I’ve never seen a good religious or secular argument for objective morality. So let’s grant #1 for the sake of argument. What’s wrong with the rest?
The problem is that #2 asserts that there’s an objective morality — but does does this based on our intuitions alone. But intuitions are subjective — in fact there’s nothing to prevent an explanation of our moral intuitions without God. (I think such a thing has been done by Dawkins’s original selfish gene theory.) Once we take into account that #2 relies on moral intuitions, we need to rewrite the argument’s real form:
- If God exists, objective morality would exist AND we’d have a [correct] transcendent feeling that it exists
- If God doesn’t exist, objective morality would NOT exist AND we might have a [wrong] transcendent feeling that it exists**
- We have a transcendent feeling objective morality exists (since we intuit murder is objectively wrong)
- Therefore God exists
To quote a good saying by Gold: “[W]hen put this way, the mistake is obvious”.
But why can Craig get away with it? Why does the original form of the argument seem so compelling to so many? It must be the strength of our subjective moral intuitions. Look at #2 in the modified form of the argument. It essentially says “your intuition is wrong”. And we use our intuition a lot — even when evaluating that very statement! #2 is itself unintuitive, which makes the whole argument very hard to accept with our “gut”. But to me, this just makes it another example of a case where we can be freed from our intuitions.
Our intuitions say your umbrella has an “objective length”, irrespective of your motion relative to the umbrella. Relativity says no. Our intuition is wrong. Likewise, our intuitions say murder is somehow “intrinsically” wrong***. But looking at the argument more closely says no, our intuitions are quite likely to be wrong. Especially given what we know about our evolution.
*Note that these are effectively arguments for deism [EDIT: and/or generic theism], not Christianity! Especially not a Biblical Christianity where a God is very subjective in his moral judgements.
**Given evolutionary theory, it’s reasonable to replace “might” with “probably” or even “almost certainly”
***Whatever that means — if someone has an idea of what it would be like for something to be “intrinsicaly wrong”, please let me know!
12 comments ↓
We feel murder is wrong because there is a part of our brain that is very old, in evolutionary terms, that tells us it is ‘wrong’ to harm another similar being. This makes sense for a social animal, creatures that live in social groups and harm their relatives not only tend to harm their genes in others, they also harm their chances of passing on their genes personally.
However I can give three examples of when murder is not viewed as intrinsically wrong (by Christians) and so force them to re-define murder. This surely blows a hole in their so-called objectivity:
War. We allow, and even praise, soldiers to kill the other side, we allow bombs to be dropped even knowing that there will be innocent casualties. Either murder is intrinsically wrong and we cannot allow collateral damage or we argue for the ‘greater good’ and murder is subjectively NOT wrong in certain circumstances.
The death penalty. While many Christians are (rightly) against the death penalty plenty are not. As these people are Christians and believe in the same objective morality coming from the same omniscient, omnipotent being through the one true book how can they possibly disagree over something as fundamental as the state killing a helpless human? One side says it’s immoral to allow such people to live, the other says it is immoral to take a life. Surely that is subjective. This is also an issue for Muslims who have the death penalty for many more crimes (homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy etc.)
Sociopaths. While these people may be classed as evil, the fact remains that they are people and do not see the objective immorality of murder. They lack the function in the brain that sees harming another human as ‘bad’ and so make judgements based on other factors – either emotion or logic. People like this tend to either go to prison or do well in business, or both.
A simple point about what we’d expect to see if morality was objective: Religions and societies would be converging on independently discovered rules based on the external morality. If it is objective then it would be like science, our knowledge of it would increase over time as we discovered more and more about it. I look around the world and I do not see a convergence upon this morality. I see western cultures moving towards a morality based on equality and individual rights (terror laws excepted) but this tends to be based on secular views rather than religious ones. I see other cultures struggling to progress as their religious morality keeps them in bronze age shackles where women are spat at in the street for baring their arms and have acid thrown in their faces for having the audacity to go to school.
How can morality be objective if a billion people think it is immoral for a woman to show her hair in public and the rest don’t. The argument “they’re wrong” doesn’t hold if morality is objective unless you can prove they’re wrong. They know innately, intrinsically and in their gut that it is wrong for a woman to show her hair. You know that isn’t the case. If morality is objective you should be able to prove it one way or the other. We can’t, therefore it must be subjective.
Just one more example of what objective morality is to christians:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-af-nigeria-child-witches,0,3012806,full.story
Let me play Christian’s Advocate on WLC’s behalf:
He’s not arguing that everyone agrees on what objective morality says about any given subject — just that everyone without a brain injury (ie. discounting sociopaths) agrees that there are things you “ought” to do, even if they disagree about details. Plus, most people would say murder is wrong even if they have just murdered a “witch child” — such acts are usually justified by other reasons (eg. preventing the witch from murdering more people). The argument is about the feeling that there IS an “ought”, not what that “ought” is.
If everyone in the world thinks there ‘ought’ to be a perfect number but they all disagree on which number that is (we have enough numbers to go round) does that feeling that their ‘ought’ to be an objective perfect number mean there is one?
Surely the point of anything being objective is that we can all investigate an uncover more facts about it leading, inexorably, towards the truth? In the number example, if the investigation into the perfect number yielded a clue that the number WAS (not ought to be) even then we’d have a small step on a long journey. I’d argue that we do not have this for morality.
The feeling that we ought not to harm/murder is easily, and better, explained by biology and evolution. We can see which parts of the brain actually engage when we consider harming another person.
I appreciate you’re attempting to argue the other side here, but “The argument is about the feeling that there IS an “oughtâ€?, not what that “oughtâ€? is.” just doesn’t wash with me. The fact that everyone (or every culture) has an ought but the oughts are different is one of the most compelling arguments that morality is subjective.
That there is an ought suggests there is such a thing as morality. That it is different in most societies can only lead (me) to the conclusion that it is subjective – virtually by definition: a person’s perspective or opinion, particularly feelings, beliefs, and desires. It is often used casually to refer to unsubstantiated personal opinions, in contrast to knowledge and fact-based beliefs.
(Not the best formed post – will, at some point, write a blog on it.)
Keddaw has a good point, to which I’d add that morality still wouldn’t be objective even if everyone in the world agreed on it.
WLC makes his mistake in the strongest possible formulation of his argument (we know there’s objective morality because we all agree that “there is an ought”) by assuming that universal agreement means anything. For there to be objective morality, it would have to be something which we could analyze, and by so doing, discover testable-but-counterintuitive facts. The common-sense view of morality, though, is that our intuitions in some strong sense are the facts, which to me dunks the whole enterprise into total BS (objective morality, that is – not ethics as a whole).
I agree — I guess my point was that even in the strongest possible version of WLC’s argument (say if everyone agreed on the same objective morality), it still wouldn’t do. I still think the argument’s a lot more attractive to most people than we give it credit for.
“Well of course there’s a God, otherwise why would murder be wrong? Or are you for Hitler or something since you don’t believe in a God-given objective morality?”
I didn’t deal with the 2nd part of this (the personal attack), might do it in a later post.
This discussion has come up several times amongst friends and in Philosophy class.
We “intuit” murder as wrong because of our language. Murder is by definition an *unjust* killing (rather, killing that is defined as breaking the law).
Yeah, that’s a big one. As long as “murder” means “the wrongful killing of a person,” it’s going to be wrong by definition and the hard work is only to figure out whether a particular killing is also a murder. “Mere killing” is not always wrong, neither in definition nor in reality, but that gets complicated (whine!), and lots of people want black-and-white morality because they like their authoritarian dick-waving (man, I got that phrase into my lexicon just once, and now it won’t get out!).
“But objective morality does exist (since we know murder is objectively wrong)”
Is something objective just because the vast majority of humans agree on it? If all of humanity agreed that the moon was made of green cheese, does that make the green cheese moon an objective truth?
Taking that point to a moral level, there was a time when slavery of one form or another was almost universally seen to be morally acceptable. Can objective truths change over time?
As for even murder, at one time certain Native American tribes allowed the family of the victim of a homicide decide if the act was moral or not and then what the punishment (if any) should be. The “we” in “we all agree” seems quite subjective in and of itself.
[...] a previous post I looked at William Lane Craig’s concise argument from objective morality. With that as the [...]
Sorry Tully, I accidentally pressed Spam on your comment and had to fish it out again.
Of course the “we agree” part is very subjective, this is part of my argument against Craig.
However as for morality changing, I think Craig would assume that we would say slavery was always wrong and that it’s only the existence of a God’s moral law that could be the only justification we have for making that claim. But the problems with that are the same as the problems with his original argument.
[...] Relativity]: Your umbrella has no “true” length. Your life has no “true” [...]