Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For subsequent entries, see index.

We’re now on to Dr. Marshall’s “Moral Argument” for the existence of God. He just elaborated on that, and I replied. Here is Marshall’s reply in turn.


That the Evidence Points to God (XI)

by Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.

Dr. Carrier denies the first premise of the Moral Argument (“If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist”) and seeks to affirm the second (“Objective moral values and duties exist”). His own theory is a form of moral constructivism. MC theories work by positing a hypothetical group of idealized persons. The moral choices or judgments such a group could reasonably be expected to make constitute or “construct” the moral values, and actions are then judged good or evil on the basis of whether they conform to those values.

In order for MC theories to “get off the ground,” it needs to be at least plausible that the judgments of the idealized group would coalesce around some central themes sufficient to ground a moral system. Moreover, those central themes need to “track” with the content of our basic moral intuitions (if the idealized group would sanction raping and pillaging, for example, we’d obviously need to reconfigure the group’s definition). If these two conditions can be met, the next challenge is to articulate a ground for moral obligation to the system (“duties”) in a way that is faithful to the phenomenology of moral experience.

Dr. Carrier actually gives two different definitions of his idealized group: “rational and fully informed” and “good, rational, and informed.” The insertion of “good” introduces a circularity in the theory, however, especially since Dr. Carrier defines a “good” person as someone who aims at being the kind of person he (the idealized agent) would be okay with everyone else being. The whole point of MC theories is to discover what “good” is on the basis of how the idealized group would act. So one can’t begin by specifying in advance that the idealized agents will “of course live by the golden rule,” [1] because this would render the whole exercise pointless, as the theorist has in that case already determined the outcome of “good” before he begins.

So I’ll await Dr. Carrier’s clarification before assessing whether his theory meets the two preliminary conditions mentioned above. I think he will want to withdraw “good” from the definition of the idealized group and then argue that “rational and fully informed” persons would in fact choose to live by the golden rule.

In the meantime, let me turn to Dr. Carrier’s ideas about obligation and moral censure. On his view, moral obligation (“oughtness”) upon persons living in that system is purely consequential, and derives from the objective fact that they will be happier and more “satisfied” to the extent that they follow the golden rule. All moral claims become prudential advice: “If you want X—and believe me you really do—then you must not do Y.”

It is of course true that consequences factor heavily into our moral choices, but a moral theory that reduces everything to consequences will simply not track with the categorical imperatives, the “must-be-doneness” (Mackie), that are crucial to the phenomenology of moral experience. And it is precisely from this that the legitimacy of praise, blame and especially moral outrage flow. Replacing those with the limping “You are misinformed,” “You risk a loss,” or “If only you understood what you really want deep down,” will hardly suffice. Nor will “the system will crush you,” which is a coercive rather than a moral motive. As atheist philosopher Richard Joyce explains:

I am confident that no culture employs only hypothetical imperatives as its principal normative framework. That a society thinks of nonconformity to a set of norms as a type of transgression, that it punishes noncompliance, that noncompliers feel, or are expected to feel, guilt (as opposed to foolishness at having sabotaged their own projects), that members of the society are likely to feel punitive anger towards noncompliers (as opposed to the pity that is usually reserved for those who thwart themselves)—are all factors that count as evidence against the normative framework in question being classified as hypothetical or prudential.

Joyce, “Precis.” [2]

Similarly, scholarship on folk theories of justice has shifted significantly in recent decades to the realization that folk notions of punishment are likewise retributivist rather than consequential. [3]

The evidence from anthropology and sociology are thus against the idea that the moral “ought” can be completely replaced with a prudential, or consequentialist, “ought,” and still track human moral experience. “Prudentialism is all” may be the only option on an atheistic framework, but it doesn’t qualify for the designation moral.

Suppose Jacques, an accomplished art thief, has come up with what he believes to be a foolproof plan for stealing a pair of Rembrandt portraits from the museum and setting them up in his desert-island home. We might of course try to dissuade Jacques by telling him that no plan is completely foolproof, and thus he could end up in prison, or (using a nobler motive) that he will be depriving the public of the beauty of these paintings and will feel a sense of dissatisfaction when he reflects upon this in the future.

But we can easily imagine him replying that he is extremely confident in his plan, and that whatever dissatisfaction he has previously experienced doesn’t compare with the thrill of the heist and the satisfaction of viewing the paintings in private whenever he wants. If Dr. Carrier’s theory is correct, there is no further moral reply we can make at this point. We cannot say, “But stealing (from the public good, especially) is evil!” Indeed, since Jacques thinks the minimal risk of the alleged consequences is outweighed by the likely gain, all we can say is, “Well I think you’re mistaken, but if that’s what you believe, I guess you (prudentially) should go ahead and steal the paintings.”

So Dr. Carrier’s proposal fails to be a truly moral theory, and it remains to be seen whether it can even meet the two preliminary conditions.

Miscellaneous notes:

  1. Dr. Carrier says the Moral Argument commits the equivocation fallacy by assuming non-consequential values and duties in Premise 1 and consequential ones in Premise 2; but he provides no explanation of where I said or implied this.
  2. Dr. Carrier complains I don’t understand that evolution “is not normative” and merely “fumbles toward” an ideal moral system. I understand this completely, and plainly stated so. [4] But if many of our moral convictions, and our moral sense itself, originated from a morally indifferent process, this is obviously a huge challenge to moral realism. [5]
  3. The accusation that I’m “cherry picking” uninformed philosophers skeptical of moral realism is mistaken, uncharitable, and irrelevant, since by Carrier’s own count, only 59% of atheist philosophers accept or at most “lean toward” moral realism! [6]

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Such is Dr. Marshall’s reply on the Moral Argument for God. 

Continue on to my answer.

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[1] I will use “golden rule” (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”) as shorthand for various descriptions of universal fairness (e.g., “Rules that all can live by”). Dr. Carrier’s specific articulation is ‘being the kind of person you can tolerate both others and yourself being without net adverse consequences to yourself’ [quote: “people mean by ‘good person’ … a person they can tolerate others and themselves being without a net adverse consequence to themselves.”]

[2] Richard Joyce, “Precis of The Evolution of Morality, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2008): 26.

[3] See Thomas Nadelhoffer, Saeideh Heshmati, Deanna Kaplan and Shaun Nichols, “Folk Retributivism: In Theory and Action,” Economics and Philosophy 29 (2013): 235-61.

[4] This is why I used the word “probably” when I wrote, “Humans have the moral convictions they do because at some point in our evolutionary history they were probably useful to survival and reproduction,” and then added that for moral convictions that did so originate, “They may still be, or they may no longer be.”

[5] For an elaboration of these problems, in addition to the Michael Ruse essay I cited in my previous entry (“Is Rape Wrong on Andromeda?”), see also the penetrating article by Sharon Street, “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”, Philosophical Studies 127 (2006): 109-66.

[6] See Footnote 2 in Dr. Carrier’s previous entry. It is in any case pointless to quibble about statistics here, since my references to these philosophers was simply to illustrate the observation that there are plenty of atheists who accept Premise 1 of the moral argument, or are at least skeptical about whether naturalistic moral realism can be defended (Pinker, e.g., proposes only a “diluted” version of moral realism). The fact that many atheists accept Premise 1, and many others accept Premise 2, and some theists even reject Premise 1, is one of the things that makes the Moral Argument a particularly interesting discussion, as its premises do not sharply divide us along party lines.

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