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:
- 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.
- 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]
- 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]
-:-
Such is Dr. Marshall’s reply on the Moral Argument for God.
Continue on to my answer.
-:-
[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.
In Dr. Carrier’s 1st response to your Moral Argument for the Existence of God, Dr. Carrier said this:
Since resurrecting dead people fully healed of all infirmities and injuries would require a miracle performed by God, this seems like an amazingly poor choice for a defeater of the existence of God. rejnrejn is Richard M. Evans
Why would it require a miracle from God? It could simply be an evolved biological function (akin to chrysalis metamorphism). There may well be an alien species in the universe that’s already like this. Or has made itself like that, through virtual realities or genetic engineering.
Ever see the movie Zardoz? Absent the dysfunctional social system conducing to misery, the biological system exhibited there is exactly as I described: death automatically regenerates everyone back into perfect health—using technology, not miracles.
But more to the point, there does not need to be such a system for my argument. My argument is not that there are such systems. My argument is that moral facts derive from the way systems are. And we can prove that by changing the system and seeing what it would do to the moral facts obtaining in that system. Doing that conceptually proves the point fully as well as doing it actually.
So if you thought I was talking about some real system being like that somewhere, you totally missed the point.
Dr. Marshall, you’ve heavily pinned your argument on morals being non-consequential and non-prudential. But I struggle to see how that is a relevant morality. Your view of morality would seem to be bereft of oughtness.
If there is no inherent consequence to an action, and no prudential value, then there appears to exist no motivating cause for action (the oughtness itself). You will have to say that moral oughts are simply brute facts, or that the desire to follow moral goods are somehow inherent to all moral agents. The former would be discarding argument for assertion. The latter seems obviously false based on our knowledge of humanity.
So if a thief plans to steal some paintings, what would you say to dissuade them? In the very worst way, I fear your only response would be to devolve the conversation into presuppositionalism.
“I fear your only response would be to devolve the conversation into presuppositionalism.” Which would be wholly ineffectual upon the thief.
Indeed Dr. Marshall doesn’t seem to realize all his own arguments, if valid, destroy the relevance of even his own morality.
So, imagine that this is the situation: the thief plans to steal some paintings. You tell them that doing so would be morally wrong. The thief agrees, but then replies that they don’t care about morality. At that point, there’s no longer any moral argument you can make that would dissuade them. They, at least with that action, are at best amoral and at worst immoral. All you would have left is to argue on pragmatics: you wouldn’t be trying to convince them that it’s immoral to do that — they already agree — but just that it isn’t in their own personal self-interest to do it. But, again, that’s not a moral argument, and so you would have taken the discussion out of the moral realm and into the realm of pragmatics. So asking for anything more than that to dissuade them is to ask for a non-moral argument. No one concerned with morality should EVER allow a move to an explicitly non-moral discussion to justify moral statements.
To put it another way, imagine that the thief convinces you that it would be in your personal self-interest to steal or allow them to steal the painting. This would mean, if Dr. Carrier’s view is correct, that you would have to then be convinced that it really was the morally correct thing to do. This doesn’t seem like morality anymore.
Note that this depends on whether the thief is rational, sane, and correctly informed of all relevant facts or not.
That a creationist refuses to accept all argument that evolution is true, even when it is fully rational and informed argument, doe not make evolution false. There is a difference between whether the proposition being argued for is true, and whether a person is too deluded to accept what’s true. The latter person in the moral case will continue to live a self-undermining and dissatisfying life (that psychology shows they will tend to blame on everyone else, erroneously). That’s the problem with being insane, irrational, and stalwartly ignorant.
If there actually were a rational (as in, without fallacy) argument solely dependent on true (and all pertinently true) facts that anyone should steal a certain painting, then that in fact would be the moral thing to do. We have lots of examples of this, e.g. killing in self-defense, stealing to rectify a gross wrong, etc. But the conditions have to be met: only true facts can be used in the argument; no pertinent facts can be left out; and none of the argument can be fallacious (the conclusion must in fact follow from the premises).
This is just as true in Christianity as in any other system of morality, so it isn’t really a valid objection to any moral system. For example, “if God commanded us to steal, it would be moral” or “if it were in God’s nature to endorse stealing, and God’s nature is good, then it is moral to steal” and so on. Change the facts, and you change what’s moral. The question is: would a rationally informed person agree. No other opinion matters. Not even God’s (after all, e.g., if only an irrational person would heed God, then God’s opinion is to be rejected by all rational persons).
Notice this describes in fact all moral argument whatever. Whenever anyone wants to insist their morals are true and your contrary morals false, they always try to argue you have the facts wrong or are reasoning fallaciously. Even when they claim (often incorrectly) that you have the wrong values, that switches to arguing you should have the right values, which devolves, once again, into arguing you have the facts wrong or are reasoning fallaciously. Which means if you don’t have the facts wrong and aren’t reasoning fallaciously, they are the one whose morals are false.
For more on this, see my whole section on the point in The End of Christianity, “The Moral Worry (or ‘Caveman Say Science Scary!’),” pp. 343-47).
If they agree with your assessment of the morality of the action, from the specific moral perspective there’s no possible failure of rationality, sanity or facts in their determination of what is moral. They agree with you that stealing the painting would be immoral, but nevertheless they’re going to do it anyway.
You’re right that any moral system has that issue — which was my point, showing that yours has it as well as Marshall’s in response to the original comment — but there is a difference. For pretty much all other moral systems, if we hit a roadblock on morality — either they disagree with us over what is moral or decide that they don’t care whether or not the action is moral — we would then devolve to appealing to self-interest: well, if you don’t care about the morality of it, you should at least care about your own personal self-interest, and also then we’d apply sanctions and punishments to them to encourage that. But we’d see that as being different from moral considerations. In your view, however, that’s not possible, as personal self-interest has to be considered and indeed is a defining quality of what is moral. It doesn’t seem possible under your view for someone to accept that something is moral without also accepting that it’s in their personal self-interest to do it.
This, then, makes your view an Egoist one, as morality has to be critically defined as acting in one’s own self-interest to pull that off. This means that it has all of the attendant problems of Egoistic ones, mostly that if something that we would normally consider immoral happens to be in someone’s self-interest, even if just in very specific cases, then not only is it morally permissible for them to take that action, they are, in fact, morally OBLIGATED to take that action. And it isn’t all that hard to find specific cases where someone can “get away” with doing things that we would consider immoral.
Take the painting example. Imagine that you’re inventorying an attic full of paintings that someone inherited. The person has no idea what paintings are up there. You find one particular painting that you really, really like. It’s not a famous painting, so no one will remark on you having it. You just like it. All you have to do is not note it on the inventory and take it home. The risk of you getting caught is negligible, and even if you were caught there’s no real consequence either to you or society as you aren’t going to see this person again and you aren’t any kind of professional and so you doing this won’t cause any lack of trust for the profession. All that will happen is that the person might grumble that they have to be careful because some people might do immoral things, which in any human society we have to watch out for anyway. Given that the risk is low and the personal reward is high, why shouldn’t you steal the painting?
You do try to take Mill’s route of defining a hierarchy of values and desires to subordinate the supposedly “baser” ones that would lead to these actions, but the issue with this is always going to be that you have to allow for people to have different preferences and desires, at which point there’ll always be a loophole here. Non-Egostic views get around that by simply defining the virtues and insisting that people should be satisfied with them, and so they don’t need to justify themselves by demonstrating how their view, at the end of the day, really IS in the person’s self-interest. They can say that if you aren’t willing to be moral because it doesn’t benefit you personally then you’re clearly not a moral person. But Egoistic views — and yours — can’t make that move, which then always runs into the cases where someone can get away with violating what we think are the moral rules and so is actually morally obligated to do so.
I’ve always been curious what your view of Rand’s Objectivism is, because aside from the strong distaste for government your view sounds like Objectivism at its base: the only moral obligation is to provide for your own self-interest, but you have to be rational and intelligent about it which means co-operating when it makes sense to and not screwing over other people unnecessarily because, in general, that’s not in someone’s self-interest.
Correct. Because that is the only way to produce an imperative proposition that’s true. (As oppose to merely “declared”)
Note you are only verifying my point. If you care about x, then x is in your personal self-interest. Your interests are by definition the things you care about and prioritize over everything else, and thus want more than anything else.
See what you just discovered there?
Only when “I care about being a moral person more than anything else” is true will you be moral. But that means your personal interests place being a moral person above all other cares. That’s your self-interest. And “morals” in this sense are only true, when it is true that you would prioritize them over everything else, once you are deciding what to prioritize without fallacy and only on correct information. Otherwise, if no rationally informed person would agree with them, then your morals are false. Full stop.
I’ve been trying to explain this to you over and over again: you seem to keep confusing selfishness with self-interest. Morals derive from the latter not the former. And the greatest self-interest we have is not mere survival (or wealth or anything else people associate with selfishness), because those things do not in and of themselves fulfill or satisfy us as persons, but indeed can produce a considerable amount of misery, hollowness, and discontent, with oneself and one’s life—relative to what you could achieve if you recognized being more satisfied with yourself and life is more important to you. Most people have merely mistaken survival and wealth et al.—which are only tools, means to that end, not valuable ends in themselves—as the ends to pursue, producing a dissatisfaction curve. But once someone realizes this, they adjust their priorities, and become a happier person.
That is essentially the story told by literally every human on earth who went from being genuinely immoral to genuinely moral. That should be a clue. Don’t you think?
P.S. Ayn Rand was a shitty philosopher selling incoherent snake oil divorced from evidence and reality and all the progress in philosophy that was being made around her even as she wrote her lousy fiction in aid of an indefensible, misery-inducing worldview. And I say that having been one of her disciples once. Though I was also once a Marxist. So my journey has taught me a lot about how to identify seductive but false worldviews.
Keith- Of course good and evil actions have consequences, and consequences may factor heavily in various moral decisions or dilemmas, as I have said. But consequences are not the GROUND of moral obligation as such. Most philosophers recognize that a moral obligation and a prudential consideration are quite different things, and that you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.”
I find this discussion very interesting. Salient points from both sides.
However, though not directly on topic, I would like to see Dr Carrier and Dr Wallace discuss the historicity of Jesus and/or the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus. After all, both are historians; and this is more of a philosophical discussion. And I get the impression Dr Carrier is more schooled in Probability Theory and Logic than is Dr Wallace. Are you planning also to debate historical questions? If not, would you consider it? Thanks
This was the debate subject my patrons funded and thus what I put the call out for, which Dr. Marshall graciously answered.
I will in future do something historical but no immediate plans. I already just did one, with Jonathan Sheffield.