Friday, November 08, 2019

A quick and dirty argument for moral realism

Somebody on the internet challenged Christians to explain why they know morality but atheists don't. His question was based on a misunderstanding about the moral argument for God. Whereas the moral argument for God makes an ontological statement about morality and its grounding, the questioner took it to be an epistemological statement. In my response, I briefly explained the distinction between the ontological and epistemological questions of morality. Then I explained that concerning the epistemological question, atheists and Christians are mostly in the same boat. Here's my response:

I think that moral ontology and moral epistemology are distinct things. What makes something true and how we know that something is true are two different things.

What Christianity provides that atheism doesn't is an ontological foundation for objective morals. But epistemologically, we are all on the same footing.

Most of what we know to be right or wrong are conclusion we draw from broader moral principles. We deduce what we should do in specific circumstances given certain virtues, values, and principles that we accept. These deductions require the use of the same laws of logic that atheists and Christians all know about.

But our reasoning can only go so far. If I say that such and such is wrong, then you ask me, "Why is it wrong?" I'll give you an argument. One of the premises in my argument will be another moral principle. So you can ask me again why I think that moral principle is true, and I may give you another argument with yet another moral premise, etc. But we can't keep doing this forever or else we'll have an infinite regress and no real moral principles. So there must be a foundation of moral principles that can't be reduced any further. The question then becomes how we know those moral principles since it isn't on the basis of deducing them from prior principles.

In this case, I think we know morality in the same way that we know the external world, the uniformity of nature, and the past. The external world could be an illusion since all perception happens solely in the mind. But we all have this natural instinct to affirm that what we perceive is real, and we hold on to this natural inclination to trust our senses until we have good reason to think we're mistaken. There are times when our senses deceive us, like when we have dreams and hallucinations or when we see illusions or mirages. But these misfires do not prevent us from believing, fairly strongly, that in general, our senses are giving us true information about an external world that actually exists. People who deny this are just kidding themselves.

The same sort of things is true about the past. It's possible we were all created five minutes ago complete with memories of things that never happened. But just because it's possible doesn't mean it's reasonable to believe. And sometimes our memories fail us. We remember things wrong, we forget things altogether, and sometimes we "remember" things that didn't even happen. But none of these mistakes we make undermine the general reliability of our memories, so we all believe that there was a past that actually happened in spite of the fact that our intuitive knowledge of the past is fallible.

The uniformity of nature is a necessary assumption for us to learn anything from experience. An infant can learn that "fire is hot" just by experiencing it. He only has to stick his finger in the candle one or two times before he's convinced that he'll burn his finger if he does it again. Even from an early age, we have this built in assumption that the future will resemble the past or that what we experience can be extrapolated to what we do not experience. Science would not be possible without this principle because without the principle, nothing that happens in the lab would have any relevance to the world outside the lab. Nothing that was observed yesterday would have any bearing on what we should expect tomorrow. Even animals learn by experience. This principle can't be proved. The only way you might try to prove it is by reasoning that since it has always yielded true information in the past, it will probably continue to do so in the future. But that is to assume the very thing under question, so it's a circular argument and doesn't prove anything. We sometimes make mistakes when we apply the uniformity of nature. This happens when we make hasty generalizations. But the fact that we can make mistakes when applying the principle doesn't undermine our belief in the principle.

I could go on to mention other things we know in a similar manner. There are some items of knowledge that are just hardwired into us. We were designed to have this knowledge. None of these things can be proved, and we do sometimes make mistakes regarding these things. We see things that aren't there, remember things wrongly, and make hasty generalizations. But we are still justified in believing in the past, the external world, and the uniformity of nature.

I think morality is known in the same way. We all know that there's a difference between right and wrong. We may disagree on the content of those moral principles because we make mistakes when reasoning from broad principles to specific circumstances. Or we may make mistakes in the same way we make mistakes when trusting our senses, our memories, or our ability to make generalizations, but this doesn't undermine our knowledge that there is a difference between right and wrong or that our ability to identify instances of rights and wrongs in a generally reliable way.

Since morality is hardwired into atheists just as much as Christians, we are on the same epistemological footing. If we weren't, then Christians and atheist would never be able to have meaningful debates with each other on moral issues. But we have debates all the time.

Each of us struggles sometimes with moral issues. We're struggling to figure out the right course of actions. Well, moral decision making would not be difficult if we didn't have an innate sense of morality. It is because we know innately that there are correct answers to moral questions that we struggle so much to find them. Sometimes moral decision making is difficult because there are moral dilemmas in which more than one moral value comes into play. The value of courage might run against the value of life in some scenarios, and we have to decide which one is more important. Two people can agree that two character traits are both virtues but disagree on which one is the greater virtue. And as a consequence, they'll solve the moral dilemma differently.

The only advantage Christians have over atheists when it comes to solving difficult moral problems is that Christians have an additional source of guidance--the Bible. If the Bible is God's revelation to man, then however difficult it may be to understand, it gives us at least something else to go on.

Further reading

Here's another quick and dirty style post I made on moral realism: "Are moral realists delusional?"

Here's my opening statement in a debate I had on moral relativism in which I defended moral realism using a similar argument as above: "All morality is relative"

Here's my opening in another debate on morality where I defended moral realism. I modify my presentation almost every time I make this argument just to keep it fresh or emphasize a particular point or to make clear what wasn't clear in a different presentation, but this was one of my earliest attempts: "Morality debate, part 1"

This is an excerpt from a dialogue I had with a guy in the comment section of another blog in which I defended moral realism: "My moral epistemology"

3 comments:

staircaseghost said...

No, we don't.

Phenomenologically, our experience of finding something right or wrong is a rush of emotive and noncognitive intuition that's about as far from what it feels like to do pure deductive logic as possible.

And the science backs this up. We come with multiple conflicting deontic impulses that are often so opaque to consciousness that moral dumbfounding is a real thing -- something that absolutely should not exist if the psychology of moral reasoning were anything like deducing propositions from first principles.

The thing about moral truths is that they are, contra the relativists, moDally necessary. They are true in every logically possible world.

If something is true in every possible world, it could not have been otherwise.

If something could not have been otherwise, it cannot stand in a causal relation.

If something cannot stand in a causal relation, then nothing, not even the gods, can "make" it true, or "explain" its existence. Therefore TAG is a nonstarter.

All my available evidence suggests Christians do not in general find the Bible as an "additional source of guidance". According to the Bible, raping a woman is a property crime a man commits against another man, and in some cases it prescribes the death penalty for rape *victims*. These eternal moral truths have become... "sociologically untenable" of late , shall we say. This observation makes perfect sense on the hypothesis that people's own moral intuitions bring them to pick and choose which parts of the text to endorse, and very little sense on the hypothesis that Chrisitans are deductive moral robots, mechanically applying naked logic to unquestionable axioms and letting the chips fall where they may.

If, by the end of lunch today, I were to become completely convinced and re-converted to the truth of the Christian religion, soup to nuts, I would still be a meta-ethical Expressivist; and even if I were to become a moral realist by suppertime, I would still say the AFM is a terrible argument.

Sam Harper said...

I'm not sure I understand half of what you're saying, so excuse me if this is all off base.

I get the impression you think the moral conclusions we come to when we're in the moment are purely instinctual without there being any process of reasoning involved, and for that reason are not deductive. While I agree that in most cases, we instinctively come to our moral conclusions, I don't think this means we aren't reasoning deductively. A person need not explicitly think through a line of deductive reasoning in order to be reasoning deductively. Deductive reasoning can happen on a subconscious level. We can tell that our reasoning is deductive by simply asking ourselves why we think that such and such is true and considering the reasons.

For example, if I asked somebody, "Do you think Bob is mortal?" they'd instinctively answer, "Yes," without explicitly thinking through a line of reasoning. But if I went on to ask, "Why do you think Bob is mortal?" they might take a second to think about it before saying, "Well, because all men are mortal." He may not even follow it up with, "And Bob is a man." Yet that is the honest reason for why he thinks Bob is mortal.

There are frequently hidden assumptions in our reasoning. We don't have to think about them explicitly for them to do their work. In the above scenario, the person I'm talking to just assumes that Bob is a man to complete his reasoning. He doesn't even have to think about it.

The same thing is true with moral reasoning. This is the case especially when we're talking about easy moral decisions. For example, if you're walking behind somebody who drops their wallet, you'll pick up the wallet and hand it to them right away without even thinking about it. But if somebody asked you why you didn't just keep the wallet, you'd have to think about the reasons. The fact that you didn't consciously reason your way to the conclusion that it would've been wrong to keep the wallet doesn't mean there weren't underlying general moral premises that informed your decision. If you were always taught to be kind and considerate, then that moral principle will be so ingrained in you that the response to the stranger will be automatic. You have subconsciously deduced that you ought to give the wallet to the stranger because (1) You should be kind and considerate and (2) giving the wallet back to the stranger is kind and considerate.

So yes, we do reason deductively about morals. But we do so explicitly in cases where moral decision-making is difficult because in those cases we are forced to think things through carefully, to consider all the moral issues involved, including what we think the consequences will be, what our motives are, as well as weighing all the pros and cons.

Toward the end of your post, you said, "even if I were to become a moral realist by suppertime. . .," which makes it sound like you are not a moral realists yet. But earlier you said that moral truths are "true in every logically possible world," which makes it sound like you are already a moral realist. So I don't know how to make sense of these two things. Are you a moral realist or not? Have you had supper yet?

Sam Harper said...


If I understand your argument correctly, it sounds like you're saying that God cannot ground morality because morality doesn't stand in causal relation to anything, and if something can't stand in causal relation to anything, then nothing else can explain its existence. This is all irrelevant to my post, so I'm tempted to ignore it, but I am curious about two of your premises and why you think they are true. Well, actually, I'm curious about three of your premises.

First, why do you think morals are true in every logically possible world?

Your second premise is obviously true, so no gripe there.

Why do you think that if something could not have been otherwise, that it cannot stand in a causal relation?

And why do you think that if something cannot stand in causal relation, then nothing can make it true or explain its existence?

None of these premises, other than the second one, seem to me to be true, but it's an interesting argument, and I'm curious how you might defend it.

As far as whether Christians use the Bible as a guide, your argument appears to be that since there are moral imperatives in the Bible that Christians don't adhere to, then they don't use the Bible as a guide. There are a few things wrong with your argument.

First, your conclusion doesn't follow. It could be that sometimes our moral intuitions come into conflict with what we think the Bible is telling us, which puts a Christian in a moral dilemma. A Christian can resolve the moral dilemma in one of two ways. They can either err on the side of what the Bible says, or they can err on the side of what their conscience tells them. The fact that they sometime err on the side of conscience does not not mean that they don't use the Bible as a moral guide. It only means that conscience won out in that particular instance. Usually in these cases, the Christian will look for an alternative interpretation of the Biblical passage that lets them off the hook so there's no conflict.

Second, the example you used is just based on faulty theology. Your are alluding to laws in the Mosaic convent and mistakenly calling them "eternal moral truths." While the Mosaic law does codify some eternal moral truths, not everything in the Mosaic law is an eternal moral truth. For example, the Mosaic law has a provision for divorce, but according to Jesus, this provision was merely a concession but did not reflect God's perfect moral will, which was for marriage to be permanent.

Third, there are plenty of moral positions that Christians take that go against the morals of the culture they live in, and they do so because in those cases, the Bible is counter-cultural. For example, Jehovah's Witnesses refuse blood transfusions solely because they think the Bible forbids them. For a lot of Christians, their sole reason for thinking homosexuality is a sin is because of the Bible. There are even homosexual Christians who are voluntarily celibate because of what they think the Bible teaches. There are Christians who don't drink alcohol because they think the Bible forbids it. A lot of Christians oppose divorce because of the Bible. I could cite several other examples, so you are mistaken to insist that Christians don't use the Bible as a moral guide. They obviously do.