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. Here Marshall is responding to my latest reply.
That the Evidence Points to God (XII)
by Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.
Dr. Carrier has read me inattentively in alleging that on my view, “there are no consequences to being moral or immoral,” and that God “doesn’t expect anyone to decide any behavior in light of [these consequences].” I plainly stated otherwise: “It is of course true that consequences factor heavily into our moral choices.” My objection is to reducing all our moral reasoning, and especially the “oughtness” we encounter in the moral realm, to evaluation of consequences.
Indeed, a theist has good reason to be confident that following the “Golden Rule” [1] will ultimately have the best consequences, though as I stated in our discussion of Dr. Carrier’s Argument from Indifference, the connection between moral conduct and external consequences is not so tight that a person would pursue the right simply to achieve those ends (Providence trains us otherwise).
Hence one must bring in the intangible, inward good of “self-satisfaction” (or whatever one wants to call it). A theist is of course operating within a context of ultimate meaning, and he would derive this satisfaction from the knowledge that he is living in accord with the Creator of all things, and thus with the chief end of human existence. He would know that his inward sense of satisfaction ultimately derives from this relationship and is rooted in the very foundation of existence. Nevertheless, this consequence does not, for the theist, negate the blank authority of moral imperatives, as if their demands were contingent on him being able to forecast a sufficient degree of self-satisfaction by adhering to them.
On Dr. Carrier’s moral theory, we must ask whether this motive of self-satisfaction will be easily maintained, to where one could conclude that an idealized group of rational, well-informed atheists would, on the ground of consequential reasoning alone, conclude to a universalized Golden Rule. That is the first hurdle.
Dr. Carrier’s idealized group would have to recognize that their inward sense of “satisfaction” (from living the GR) that Dr. Carrier lays such emphasis upon, and the parallel inward pain of guilt, are precisely the kinds of emotive states evolution would have “invented” in order to increase compliance, especially since most humans are unskilled in elaborate consequential reasoning. They would recognize that the GR-impulse was originally limited to a band, and later to a tribe, and in each case was likely “selected” for its value in helping the band or tribe survive, reproduce, and even conquer other tribes that lacked this GR-impulse. At some point, perhaps with the help of social or even religious conditioning, it morphed into a universalized GR.
Now as Dr. Carrier observed in his first reply, evolution only “fumbles” towards its goals. A species may develop a characteristic that is neither helpful nor unhelpful to those goals. More critically to this inquiry, it may develop a characteristic that is at first helpful, but when exaggerated runs counter to evolution’s goals, like the gigantic antlers of the extinct Irish elk. The idealized group could not, accordingly, uncritically privilege their sense of self-satisfaction in following the GR but would have to consider whether their sentiment for a universalized GR might have outlived its evolutionary usefulness. This uncertainty would by itself weaken the consequential motive of self-satisfaction.
We can further imagine the group hypothesizing that while it would benefit from extending a GR ethic to a select group of other tribes, it might be disadvantaged by extending it to tribes that are too weak to be a threat or to contribute external goods to them, and that in order to achieve a society more satisfying to itself in the long run, members of the group must mortify their moral intuition to a universalized GR and heroically endure the resulting sense of guilt and dissatisfaction. As Peter Haas has shown, this is precisely what the Nazis did. [2]
Dr. Carrier will of course object, “But the Nazis were misinformed in their calculations!” And so we would all want to say, but it would hardly be the first, or essential thing we would want to say, which would rather be, “I don’t care what your calculations are: what you are doing is evil!”
But the forcefulness of that response derives from a confidence that an atheistic evolutionary framework undermines or at least substantially weakens. Moreover, we can easily imagine less violent, or even non-violent, versions of Nazism that would be harder, or even impossible, to overturn on merely informational grounds, but that we would still feel were fundamentally evil.
So it seems difficult to conclude that an idealized group of rational, informed atheists will, through consequential reasoning alone, arrive at the universalized GR intuition we hold dear.
If we turn to the second, and larger, challenge of securing obligation from individual persons, the prospects for an atheistic moral theory become even more dim. Dr. Carrier chooses to dismiss rather than answer my illustration of Jacques the art thief, but I think it shows very well why even if we can establish the utility of a limited (intra-tribal or selectively inter-tribal) GR ethic (which would not be hard to do), there will still be many instances where it will be anything but clear that a particular individual will be prudentially obligated to adhere to that ethic, all the more so if the individual becomes aware of the likely evolutionary roots of the GR impulse.
Individual goals, desires, and satisfaction-states are simply too diverse for consequentialist reasoning to even pragmatically shoulder the entire burden of moral obligation. Moreover, an essential feature of moral experience is that fundamental duties demand our compliance, regardless of our desires and calculations.
Regarding the evidence from anthropology, sociology, and moral psychology, Dr. Carrier mistakenly infers that the widespread use of consequential considerations in moral motivation implies that prudential, “if-then” considerations are the sum, root, and ground of moral experience. If he thinks they are, let him answer Richard Joyce’s challenge to produce even a single instance of a culture that “employs only hypothetical imperatives as its principal normative framework” (Dr. Carrier strangely notes this word, “only,” but then proceeds to write as if it weren’t in Joyce’s sentence!).
Dr. Carrier may think informed humans should outgrow notions like “transgression,” “moral outrage,” “guilt,” and retributive punishment, [3] and respectively replace them with miscalculation, pity, foolishness, and keeping ourselves safe. If atheism were true, such a replacement would indeed seem necessary, but the resulting framework simply will not track with fundamental features of our moral experience, and for that reason, cannot qualify as a truly moral theory. Nor will those replacements (the first three, at least) prove to be psychologically livable.
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Such is Dr. Marshall’s latest reply on the Moral Argument for God.
Continue on to my answer.
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[1] To reiterate what I noted in my first entry, I am using “golden rule” (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”) as shorthand for various descriptions of universal fairness.
[2] “Far from being contemptuous of ethics, the perpetrators acted in strict conformity with an ethic which held that, however difficult and unpleasant the task might have been, mass extermination of the Jews and Gypsies was entirely justified. . . . the Holocaust as a sustained effort was possible only because a new ethic was in place that did not define the arrest and deportation of Jews as wrong and in fact defined it as ethically tolerable and even good.” Critical notice of Peter Haas, Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), by R. L. Rubenstein, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 60 (1992): 158.
[3] Theories of punishment are either (broadly speaking) “retributivist” or “consequentialist.” Consequentialists hold that a punishment is justified if it produces some greater good. Retributivists hold that a punishment is just only if the offender deserves the punishment, and that this notion of just desert must be met before any considerations of “greater good” come into play. For a lucid discussion (and compelling defense of the humaneness of the retributivist position), see C.S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” and “On Punishment: A Reply to Criticism,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1970), 287-300. Readers can access a scanned copy of those essays here.
Sentence 2 of paragraph 3 seems problematic. The initial independent clause (“A theist is of course operating within a context of ultimate meaning…”) appears to beg the question, taking for granted part of what is at issue, viz. what is the best achievable value.
(The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy has no definition of “ultimate meaning” or its component words in the ethical sense. Google doesn’t define “ultimate meaning,” but its definitions of the component words yields the definition “the best achievable value.”) The final independent clause (“…he would derive this satisfaction from the knowledge that he is living in accord with the Creator of all things, and thus with the chief end of human existence.”) seems to be a non sequitur, because “in accord with the Creator of all things” does not entail anything about “the chief end of human existence,” assuming the sense of “end” is “goal,” not “terminus.” In that final independent clause, the word “knowledge” assumes far too much. It may be the case that most theists have such a belief, but few (if any) theists have such knowledge. After all, whether such a proposition is known is part of what the debate is about.
Isn’t “undermining” or “substantially weakening” a possibly mistaken semi-instinctive response the very purpose of thinking about morality, as opposed to just feeling it? Otherwise I’m not sure what the difference is with a sentiment like “I don’t care what your calculations are, being Jewish is evil!”
Proper reasoning provides a foundation for a sentiment, which strengthens rather than weakens it. Unless, of course, the sentiment is mistaken and deservedly “undermined” by evidence to the contrary. If such undermining occurred with regard to a benevolent “Nazism” stripped of pseudoscientific and pseudohistoric nonsense, wouldn’t any lingering feeling that it was nonetheless evil be unfounded bigotry?
It seems Dr. Marshall is saying that moral actions do have consequences and those consequences do inform humans’ moral choices. Ok. But he implies there is some extra special sauce required. But there doesn’t seem to be any need for anything extra. Certainly Dr. Marshall would agree that some system of behavior could be created on consequentialism alone. But I presume he wouldn’t call that morality.
But why? Dr. Marshall correctly points out the limited mechanism of evolution, but it doesn’t in any way refute a morality borne out of it. There appears nothing in our history that would suggest humans have exhibited a morality that couldn’t be reached through evolution and discovery/application of rudimentary logic. How people feel about morality is essentially worthless as a data point in the face of the empirical data.
And yet, that really seems to be the ultimate direction of Dr. Marshall’s contention. It’s not that the alternative to his version of morality is impossible, or even improbable. It’s just that it leads to a morality he doesn’t like. It doesn’t fit the way people with unexamined beliefs talk about it. He can find ways that irrational people would get morality wrong if it wasn’t from a God. I don’t think he realizes that all the problems he has with Dr. Carrier’s moral system actually represent what we’ve seen in history, and this adds weight to the theory rather than refuting it.
He leans on the reduction to evolutionary consequences to the point of straw-manning. It seems obvious to me that a lot of moral thinking happens as a consequence of those failings of the purely evolutionary mechanisms (cf the “Software patch” analogy which Carrier uses in previous articles), and that this in no way entails a God.
I look at Jacques is being used as a red herring. I don’t believe any “system of morality” is going to convince someone in that position to change their mind (at least not very often)… I don’t think that’s the point of moral systems.
On the one hand, a successful moral system will convince a majority of people to “not be like Jacques”, and appealing to the consequences will do that (provided the claims are well-founded).
Then, if his own personal self-interest is against that of the general interest, it is up to society to enforce the moral norms, not the self-interested individual (tip off the police, improve the security around the art-work, etc.).
Finally, we would expect even a successful moral system to behave much like evolution itself, which is about the prevalence of genes in a population, and how the environment trains the population, who in turn alter the environment, which re-trains, and so on. Still no God required. Which is to say, you’d expect people in the population to not be following the moral system precisely at all times, and it will improve and change over time as the social environment evolves to encompass new challenges
DCT fails here because it insists that morality transcends the environment, such that e.g. “marriage between a cis-man and a cis-woman is the only correct model for intimate relationships” is a moral statement that is held to be true even in a society which generally accepts other forms of relationships, and one who holds such a view perceives evil where for all intents and purposes there is none (and may act accordingly).
Keith- If deriving moral authority and obligation from consequential considerations were as a simple a matter as you seem to think, philosophers wouldn’t have been vexing themselves about this problem for centuries. If you do even some general reading in moral philosophy, you will find the basic problem with your line of reasoning extensively discussed. Even philosophers who think they have found a way around it realize that it is a huge challenge.
You write, “How people feel about morality is essentially worthless as a data point.” It most certainly is not. Moral experience and convictions are what philosophers are trying to GROUND. See my opening entry on this. If one comes up with a theory of morality that translates into moral statements that don’t register with, or make nonsense of, our moral experience, then the theory is going to be ruled out as “non participating competently in moral discourse.” So one has to begin moral philosophy by a close examination of the phenomenon of moral experience itself.
I don’t follow your last paragraph about “leading to a morality I don’t like.” The CONTENT of the moral system isn’t the issue here. Dr. Carrier and I both agree that a universalized Golden Rule is objectively binding on us. We are simply arguing about what is necessary to ground that obligation.
Dr Marshall
You probably have noticed by now that christians usually put their immidiate political interests before moral values. How does that fit into the moral landscape you described above and in your previous articles?
To be fair, I’m sure Dr. Marshall (and those Christians you are talking about) would consider their political leanings a logical result of their moral values. You say that they put their politics before their morals, but I’m not sure you could substantiate the direction there. If abortion is a more important moral issue than everything else, then it could potentially justify political actions that otherwise have negative effects. In that case, it’s morals before politics, weighing the relative impact of one moral harm against others.
Now, of course, this would ultimately still fall under the moral system Dr. Carrier proposes. What determines the correct moral behavior (and political alignment) is the actual facts and expected outcomes. This is why you might think that Christians are putting politics first. If you don’t accept their moral weighting on issues, or have empirical evidence to show their actions are counter-productive, from your view the politics are superseding the morality. But, if those Christians don’t have (or believe) the data you have, it wouldn’t be accurate to say they are putting politics first.
I think Dr. Marshall would be a strong proponent of everyone getting their facts right. What I think you are teasing out, Benjamin, is that everyone does not currently have the inclination to rigorously seek facts using adequate epistemology. This is why people on both sides (left-right) tend to see the other side as wrong AND immoral: they are both “biased” by the “facts” they have.
I concur with Keith.
The main dispute here might be a difference between what we deem the appropriate role of morality in legislating laws. Religionists often think the purpose of law is to legislate morality, in whole or in part. Thus leading to observations like Keith’s.
Whereas secularists often (and myself explicitly: see Sense and Goodness without God, Part VII) deem that an invalid use of political power; that laws should only serve to ensure the maintenance of a civil society so individuals can live by their own moralities (in short, we deem the state as a necessary regulator of power, not the repository of all power). Because systems that attempt to legislate morality become oppressive and dysfunctional and ultimately self-crippling and self-destructive (the more obvious to minorities who experience the effect of “whoever is in power gets to write the laws” when “write the laws” means “enforce the morality of the majority religion”).
Laws still must be moral, but must attenuate consequences (e.g. degree of punishment enforced by the state or the community) to the evidence; thus only when we can very conclusively prove empirically that a behavior will undermine a healthy civil society is sicking the force of the state on it justifiable. Everything else, the role of the state should be to ensure uncertainty and disagreement can co-exist peacefully rather than “picking a morality at random” and elevating it into law.
Thus concurrent with the common disagreement on what the purpose of law is, is a difference in how certain we believe we can claim to be in moral conclusions. Secularists have a stronger tendency to admit moral certainty on far fewer things and to embrace many varying degrees of moral certitude below that for most else; religionists, by contrast, have a tendency to declare moral certainty about everything. This leads to different conclusions as to the wisdom of employing the state to enforce “morality” rather than a much narrower, far more empirically definable purpose.
Thanks Keith and Richard for your responses. When I posted this question I was expecting a response from Dr Marshall along the same lines that Keith outlined above. If this is the case then the Religionists make their political alignments and decisions based on consequence not some intrinsic metaphysical value on top of the consequence.
Yet the main problem I have with this type of reasoning is this: I don’t see any contradiction between electing a politician who they think is going to promote their particular agenda (say overturn roe VS wade) and at the same time criticizing him when he acts immorally. For example, if you believe abortion is the primary issue you can justify voting for a candidate who is more likely to overturn abortion rights despite his multiple moral flaws. You can argue that we choose between two evils the one who is less evil (as Dr Craig did on Nov 14, 2016: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/the-presidential-election/).
But you are still responsible to, at least, express some dissatisfaction when your candidate acts inappropriately. Christian church has a great deal of influence over American people and therefore a moral responsibility to stand up when their candidate acts or speaks in a manner that is clearly immoral.
Benjamin Z- I’m no expert on the voting rationales of various groups, so I can just speak from my general experience.
I imagine many voters, whether on the left or right, often find themselves choosing between the lesser of two evils, or at least the less objectionable among two undesirable candidates. I’ve had people on the left and right. religious and irreligious, tell me that they went into the 2016 presidential election “holding their noses” as they pulled the voting lever.
Abortion is the probably the biggest moral issue that engages Christian voters, and in my experience, Christians will often vote for a candidate who is closer to their views on abortion over someone who they regard as more ideal from the point of fiscal conservatism or monetary policy. Black Christian voters are perhaps an exception to this, as they tend to vote for candidates who espouse robust social programs over candidates who espouse a more limited government but are against say, mid-to-late-term abortions.
I do think that one of the primary points of education we should provide high-school students is what it means to be a “virtuous voter.” In my view, it means voting for the candidate whose policies one believes will be in the best interests of the country as a whole. I’m afraid the implicit education we give people through town halls, etc., is that people should vote for the person whose policies seem most likely to better their personal situation.
Thanks for the response Dr Marshall. My primary objection was silence or even passionate support from evangelicals with respect to some of his hateful policies such as family separation (any many more).