In 2009 philosopher Erik Wielenberg published “In Defense of Non-Natural, Non-Theistic Moral Realism” in the journal Faith and Philosophy. The abstract claims:
Many believe that objective morality requires a theistic foundation. I maintain that there are sui generis objective ethical facts that do not reduce to natural or supernatural facts. On my view, objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind. After explaining my view, I defend it against a variety of objections posed by William Wainwright, William Lane Craig, and J. P. Moreland.
But after reading his article, I can only conclude that Wielenberg does not know what the word “foundation” means as used by any of these authors when they argue for a “theistic foundation” of objective morality. Because nowhere in his article does he ever present what they mean by a foundation at all. Not even a bad one. Just none at all. It literally never comes up. And this is a problem I am finding with atheists in general; especially everyday atheists, who can perhaps be excused by not being all that well educated in philosophy, but I find even professional philosophers doing this, and they should know better by now. Thus requiring me to explain this point—yet again (I’ve gone over this many times before, e.g. from Epilogue to the Sam Harris Moral Facts Contest to Shermer vs. Pigliucci on Moral Science); but this time I will use Wielenberg’s paper as a foil for illustrating where atheists are going wrong and talking right past theists, and with catastrophic effects vis-a-vis moving anyone away from superstitions about gods and towards a reality-based worldview (an example of that point, Justin Brierley’s detailed account, I will write on in a coming month).
The Irrelevance of Wielenberg’s Actual Thesis
Ignoring the abstract, if an alien from Planet X read Wielenberg’s paper and had to report what it was about, I think they’d have to say something like: “Certain superstitious Earthlings believe meeting moral obligations cannot be rationally justified without the existence of some sort of conveniently-propertied ghost, and this Earthling shows that moral obligations have intelligible meanings without a conveniently-propertied ghost, which no one disputes and in no way replies to the superstitious Earthlings. It is therefore not possible to ascertain the point of this report.”
For example, Wielenberg quotes Craig and Moreland as saying “What does it mean to say, for example, that the moral value justice just exists? … It is clear what is meant when it is said that a person is just; but it is bewildering when it is said that in the absence of any people, justice itself exists” (p. 33). To this Wielenberg responds, “With respect to justice, my view is that there are various obtaining states of affairs concerning justice, and that when individual people have the property of being just, it is (in part) in virtue of the obtaining of some of these states of affairs” (p. 34). But that’s not what Craig and Moreland are asking.
I am certain they’d both agree that no God is required for me to say, and be stating an objective fact even, that my girlfriend’s bedroom’s decoration is “Star-Wars-y,” in that it resembles the canonical aesthetic of the Star Wars franchise. Because that isn’t saying anything about how people should or ought to “Star-Wars-ify” their bedrooms. It’s just a neutral statement of fact that the decor meets certain defining criteria. Everyone agrees justice exists in that sense, the only sense Wielenberg ever articulates. What Moreland and Craig are asking is how it can be the case that justice is moral, as in is “good,” and “good” not trivially, but in a way that motivates our caring about it, and indeed not just caring about it, but wanting our actions to conform to it—and indeed, wanting that more than we want anything else, otherwise we’d just laugh “justice” off as a curious aesthetic and continue preferring other styles of being. Wielenberg never answers this question. It does not even appear anywhere in his article as if anyone has ever asked this question, least of all the superstitious Earthlings he thinks he is answering but isn’t. Yet that is most definitely exactly what they are asking. So his paper is a non-response to their point.
Almost the only useful thing Wielenberg does say is that, if there is no God, then “it is in some sense an accident that we have the moral properties that we do,” but “that they are accidental in origin does not make these moral properties unreal or unimportant.” That is entirely true, and theists do need to hear it. It would not matter why you ought to behave a certain way if it is nevertheless true that you ought to behave that way—because it’s still the case that you ought to behave that way; so “accidental” moral facts would not be any less obligating. Yet even here Wielenberg fails to take the actual step the theists are looking for: going from the vacuous and unmotivating observation that moral standards “exist” (they are “real”) and somehow “important” (whatever that means), to actually giving an actual reason anyone should actually adhere to those standards in their behavioral choices. That is what the theists mean by the grounding of morality, by a “ground for morality,” by a “foundation” of moral obligation, and all the various other turns of phrase they like.
What these theists mean is a reason to be moral. Not the mere existence of morality as a concept. Moreover, they do not mean just “any” reason to be moral, like someone presenting a list of reasons to Star-Wars-ify their bedroom; reasons that might be entirely rational (they are not random gibberish, but are actual reasons people do or could actually have to do it) and even mildly enticing (like, enough that you even do think about it for a minute or two), but ultimately insufficient to motivate us to actually do it (because, say, we like a 60s Mod look more, or can’t be bothered because a redec would be more work than we think it’s worth). Theists mean by a “moral ground” a fully motivating reason to actually be moral—and one that would be true for everyone, and not just random people who perchance like the aesthetic they are marketing.
Wielenberg never provides any such ground for morality. He thus never responds to the theists he claims to be answering. When it comes time in his article to even get anywhere near doing that, all he says is, “Necessarily, any being that can reason, suffer, experience happiness, tell the difference between right and wrong, choose between right and wrong, and set goals for itself” thereby simply “has certain rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and certain obligations,” like for example “the duty to refrain from rape (in typical circumstances),” an example he mentions only because they brought it up. That’s a non answer. Nowhere does he connect “having” rights in this sense, with any reason anyone should care about that. For example, I too could elaborately argue that “Necessarily, any being that can reason and set goals for itself” and so on thereby simply “has the property of enjoying Star Wars.” That would be merely an unjustified assertion (it is, after all, false; we can empirically adduce ample evidence of people who don’t enjoy Star Wars). Which is also all Wielenberg gives us (we can empirically adduce ample evidence of people who don’t care about the mere “existence” of human rights). But it’s also not relevant even were it a justified true belief. That everyone enjoyed Star Wars wouldn’t be sufficient to motivate everyone to redec their bedrooms accordingly. I enjoy Star Wars. And I like my bedroom the way it is.
So it’s not simply enough to somehow show that “rights” are just a thing that follows from being people. “Violence” is also just a thing that follows from being people. So is selfishness, dishonesty, lust, gender, singing badly in the shower, garden tending, a frequent affectation for cheese. That tells us nothing about how we should behave in respect to these things. Is violence just like an affectation for cheese? Is selfishness good because it’s inherent to being a singular mind in need of self-preservation? Do gender norms follow necessarily from anything, and if so, why care? Tattoos and eyeglasses defy what nature bestowed on us; that does not make them immoral. We defy our evolved and biological nature all the time. And indeed, ample rational reasons can be given that we even ought to. But you won’t find any in Wielenberg’s paper. How do we get to the ought in morality? That’s what we’re supposed to be on about here.
To be clear, I am not here saying Wielenberg thinks “biology dictates morality.” I am only using biology as an example of “a” way rights can be properties of people in Wielenberg’s sense. But it does not matter what that way is, whether structural (all social systems of conscious beings, whatever their biology, will possess the configurable property of rights), or magical (a mystical realm of Platonic Ideals just mindlessly imbues people with the configurable property of rights), or anything else whatever (up to and including “God did it,” which you might start to realize now is a bigger problem for theists than even Wielenberg realizes). Regardless of how rights are properties of people, we need more than just some way “human rights” are an inevitable configurable property of people. We need grounds to give a shit that it is. Otherwise, we have no grounds to give a shit that it is. And that’s what perplexes Moreland and Craig. That’s what they are asking the likes of Wielenberg to produce.
And that’s why that has been what I produce: an actual grounding of morality in natural facts (under peer review in The End of Christianity; extensively in response to Moreland in Sense and Goodness without God; and in numerous articles on my blog).
The Conditional Reductio
There is one maneuver in Wielenberg’s paper that might be conceptually useful, even though it trades on a falsehood, and doesn’t get us to what either his paper’s title or abstract promise: he makes a conditional argument of roughly the form, “If we accept theistic defenses of God as a brute fact, then we must accept my defense of moral facts as brute facts.” Wielenberg’s argument is then a fortiori: if God can be a brute fact, then it is even more likely moral facts can be brute facts, as they are far simpler in component structure (indeed, God becomes a useless epicycle: why do we need two brute facts, morality and a divine personality? If all we need is the one brute fact, what evidence remains that we have the other?). I don’t think either is likely to be a brute fact (their complexity is too great, thus requiring too improbable an existential coincidence to count on); and proposing they “are” brute facts still requires us to produce evidence that they even exist in the first place (and Wielenberg doesn’t really do that here, not in what I am pointing out is the required sense).
But it is true that if it is credible to accept God (the most amazingly improbable and outrageously convenient assembly of attributes) is a brute fact, then you cannot rationally say that it is not credible to accept moral facts (a far less complex and convenient set of things) as brute facts. The theist is stuck in a conundrum there, and Wielenberg does close this trap well, showing that theists really are compelled to accept God is a brute fact (since they have failed in practice to prove he is a logically necessary fact, despite constantly insisting they haven’t); and therefore, they cannot maintain God exists and reject Wielenberg’s stance on morality. Okay. But that doesn’t get us anywhere near proving Wielenberg’s grounding of morality actually exists. That it “could” is not enough. And in any event, he never gets around to articulating what his ground of morality even is, beyond being “possibly” a brute fact. Because he never links his defense of the idea of morality to a defense of any sufficient motivation to care about it.
So this is true:
The conclusion of all of this is as follows. Let us suppose that the two options on the table are the following: (i) objective ethics has as its ultimate foundation some set of objective ethical facts, and (ii) objective ethics has as its ultimate foundation a necessarily existing perfect person. Both approaches ultimately ground objective morality on substantive, necessary brute facts. … There may be a good reason to prefer one of these views over the other, but, as far as I can see, such a reason is not to be found [in anything theists argue] …
Wielenberg 2009, p. 32.
But all this gets us is a mere possibility of some grounding of moral facts that is a brute fact. It gets us nowhere to “the grounding of moral facts is a brute fact,” or even to what “the grounding of moral facts” actually is, or even that there is one. “Could be” does not get us “is.” Possibly does not mean probably. This is the ever-frustrating fallacy of possibiliter ergo probabiliter that so typifies Christian apologetics. Atheists shouldn’t be using it too.
Walking Through the Problem
To be fair Wielenberg is in this report more concerned to refute the Moral Argument for God than actually grounding moral facts, but it is impossible to do the one without the other, unless your position is that there is no grounds for morality. So I think one should reorient priorities here. Wielenberg opened his paper with the declaration that “the moral argument appears to be among the most popular and psychologically effective,” yet the 2020 PhilPapers Survey found the opposite: almost no philosopher (Christians included!) rates it as the best argument for God (fewer than 10% of respondents, by any metric, even included it among the best). And you might want to ask why that is. I think because it confuses desire for fact, and thus is epistemically fallacious as an argument for gods; that we want there to be moral facts cannot be an argument that there are any, and like gods, there might just not be any. And philosophers are rating the logical soundness of arguments for God, not the psychological effectiveness of illogical arguments.
But that leaves those of us who do think morality has a ground, a foundation, in the actually relevant sense: an actual justification for being moral. I’ve long struggled to understand what Wielenberg thinks that is. I haven’t found it in any of his articles or books; and this, by its title, I thought surely should. Which is strange, as he is confident he has one, and that it requires no deity (as I’m sure no genuine moral facts do). So I’d really like to know what it is, and thereby whether it corroborates or challenges what I have so far found it to be, a fundamental requirement of scientific progress on any problem. To get at what I mean by this requires going through some stages of thinking in Wielenberg’s article which may at first seem a digression, but trust me, they do connect back the central point.
“Consider,” Wielenberg proposes, “the state of affairs in which it is morally wrong to torture the innocent just for fun and the state of affairs in which pain is intrinsically bad (that is, bad in its own nature, or in and of itself).” He maintains that “these states of affairs obtain not just in the actual world but in all metaphysically possible worlds” (p. 26). This is actually false as stated. It is false in two different but connected respects: first, semantically; second, physically.
Semantically, I have visited many a dungeon in which it was perfectly moral “to torture the innocent just for fun.” Now, what I mean by this is, in some respect, a triviality; I think Wielenberg could fix this problem with suitable rewording, such as he gets to later when he starts incorporating “consent” as a key component of moral propositions. In those dungeons (and many a private bedroom), it is only moral “to torture the innocent just for fun” if they informedly and competently consent to it. So one might say Wielenberg is hanging a lot on key words like “just” for fun or “innocent.” But these are distinctions that should not be left unstated. They matter. Pain is simply not intrinsically bad. It is only contextually bad. And that begs explanation. Why does context matter? Which means, not merely why might we care about context, but why should we care about context? Think about it. Put a pin in that.
One might ask whether it is moral for a sociopath who does not at all care about others “to torture the innocent just for fun” so long as they are always appropriately consenting adults. Yes, that sounds like some sort of moral Gettier Problem. But think about it. Do we mean to classify mere mental stances as moral or immoral? Or is that sociopath still “behaving morally”? The fact that you are asking that question would mean the question itself has quite a lot to do with what you care about. What is more important, that a sociopath think correctly, or that they always behave in ways you will not find alarming and a social problem to deal with? It’s difficult to intuitively answer that question because it is nigh impossible to decouple “thinking correctly” from “always behaving in correct ways.” Because the very reason you might give to be concerned about “thinking incorrectly” is simply that an incorrect mindset risks causing incorrect behavior; and we can’t really conceive of an incorrect mindset perfectly reliably producing nothing but correct behavior. That would require such an extraordinary set of coincidences as to not even contemplate as a possibility worth considering. Bad minds simply are dangerous because they cause bad behavior. That’s really the only rational reason to care about them. But that would leave bad behavior as the actual thing we have any ground to care about. And even when they are logically inseparable (e.g. you will adjudge pretending to love you as bad, therefore the goods of love can only exist for you with a good mindset in the one who loves you; they are effectively synonymous), we’re still talking about which natural facts we care about.
Which gets us to the physical sense in which Wielenberg’s statement is false. Imagine a world (and indeed, someday someone may even be able to produce and live in it, whether that’s a good idea or not) where “torturing the innocent just for fun” cures all diseases and disorders (mental and physical), up to and including restoring youth and fitness to the elderly, and where nothing else effects any such cure, and where anyone who isn’t ever tortured, rapidly ages and accumulates diseases and disorders endlessly until they become a gibbering, incompetent lunatic—who can be at once fully restored if someone tortures them just for fun. It’s hard to argue that in that universe it is “morally wrong to torture the innocent just for fun.” In that universe, to the contrary, it is arguably morally right to do so. All because we simply changed the physical facts. Which seems to indicate that moral facts are grounded in natural facts.
Okay. How might we push back on that? You could say that, well, the competent should still have to consent. But that won’t apply to those who have become so ailed they lack competence to consent. At that point, is it really more moral to let them die in gibbering madness than to torture them for fun and thereby cure them? We do, after all, deem it moral to perform painful and invasive procedures on children and the insane, when there is sufficient need to, such as to preserve their own life or limb. And in this bizarre alternative world, that’s basically what “torturing the innocent just for fun” simply does. So it seems evident that changing the natural facts, changes the moral facts. Or you might try to argue the world proposed is impossible, but I doubt it (once we have virtual worlds to play in, the “impossible” will have a lot less meaning), and in any case, all you are then arguing is still that the moral fact you insist upon derives from some physical fact (like, the intentions of the “torturer,” or the physical impossibility of “selfish intentions” ever being consistently aligned with “unselfish outcomes”). You thus have just grounded moral facts in natural facts again. You can’t escape this. No matter how you try to maneuver, all you end up doing is defending the same conclusion: moral facts are grounded in physical, hence natural facts.
Now, this hasn’t gotten us to a conclusion yet. Because we haven’t gotten to why we should care about these outcomes. And morality must ultimately be grounded in some such thing; or else it has no ground at all, as in, we will have no grounds to obey it. All I am showing so far is that it looks like moral facts are grounded in physical facts. So if moral motivation is also grounded (the thing Moreland and Craig are worried about), then we have good reason to suspect that that motivation will be found somewhere in the natural facts of ourselves and our world as well. Because everything else appears to be (and indeed, I mean everything else). So we should look there first, before trying to find some other presumed source (as Wielenberg does, in some kind of vague conceptology; and Moreland and Craig do, in God). Okay. Now put a pin in that.
The Problem in a Nutshell
Wielenberg says “my view does violate the principles that (i) all values are properties of persons and (ii) all values have external foundations” but “I suggest that the lesson to be drawn from this is that (i) and (ii) are false; certainly Craig and Moreland provide no arguments for such principles.” But this is only true if we categorize, for example, “justice” and “injustice” (or other “system describers”; for example, “democracy” vs. “monarchy”) as mere descriptors for possible social-causal systems. As such, “justice” (like “injustice,” “democracy,” “monarchy”) exists as a universal potential: anywhere a system is organized a certain way, it will be correctly described by that label. Such a fact requires neither (i) nor (ii) because it is entirely conditional. “If it is possible for a system to be organized at location A so as to manifest the properties defined by justice, then justice as a thing always and necessarily potentially exists at A.” This is true even if no A exists. But that does not address the actual question, which is whether justice is good, which would normally mean “preferable.” So we aren’t actually defending moral facts here. Just amoral possibilities. There is no reason to prefer a system organized as “justice” over a system organized as “injustice.” And thus no reason to call the one moral and the other not.
I think the lesson to be drawn from this is that (i) and (ii) are both true, but it is by finding how they can both be true, which still aligns with the actual empirical facts of our actual existence, that we will discover the actual grounding of moral facts. And it’s the theists who are screwed here. Because they actually never do what they are asking Wielenberg to do either. If I told you that all moral facts are grounded in the tomato on my desk, such that they can only be true—in the only relevant sense, that you really should obey them over all other alternative directives—as long as that tomato exists, have I actually grounded moral facts in anything? Switch out “your god” for “my tomato” and you have gained nothing here. God actually doesn’t ground anything even if he exists. You still have to care what God thinks (or what he is, or whatever thing theists want to ground moral facts in). If you don’t, then how does what he thinks (or is, or whatever) ground anything? Crickets.
This becomes self-evident when you switch my tomato out for a god who is a cruel, dishonest, champion of injustice (basically, Yahweh). Does that then mean cruelty and dishonesty and injustice will become moral? There is a reason the Euthyphro dilemma still stings. It is not because God can’t be perfectly good and his commands the one true morality. Rather, it is because merely being the character or commands of God is not enough to establish that it is good. If a theist says, “But God is all wise, and you should trust a wise person will know what’s right,” all they are doing is admitting the point: that there is some fact of the matter we ourselves could get to merely by being wise. We don’t need God for that, even if it would be useful to have one around. Thus you can’t get the Moral Argument for God with this line. Nor does this ground morality in God. That God can figure out what’s moral, does not entail what’s moral needs a God around to be so. So it isn’t just Wielenberg who is failing to ground morality, by not addressing what “grounding morality” really means (a motive to be moral; not the stale fact of morality merely existing). These theists aren’t really addressing it, either.
It is at this point a desperate theist might panic and show his hand and start going on about Heaven and Hell. But that is to ground morality not only back in physical facts (you are now talking about moral facts following merely from a particular physical arrangement of the world; change that physical arrangement, and you change the moral facts again), but facts for which there is zero empirical evidence. We have no data on what behaviors trap one in Hell, or get you into Heaven, or even that any do; mere assertions and thumping of Bibles does not data make. That’s even worse than the position Wielenberg is in. He can at least adduce empirical reasons why you might prefer undertaking certain behaviors over others. The theist, has jack all.
I show this in multiple respects in my paper on moral theory in The End of Christianity. Wielenberg shows it in additional ways (e.g. p. 39). For example, he documents William Lane Craig violating his own demand for a reason to be moral by simply declaring as a brute fact that God is worthy of worship (and presumably emulation or obedience), rather than justifying the claim that he is. In other words, why should we agree God is worthy of anything? That requires a ground. Hence, despite endless handwaving, theists never actually ground any morality in any god. Not even conceptually, much less empirically. They cannot provide any grounds for concluding just any nature of God will be moral, will be preferable, will be anything we’d want to admire or emulate. They always have to provide extra additional reasons why only one particular nature, should God possess it, would so qualify. Which means there must be some other grounds than God—since merely “being God” doesn’t cut it. And if that’s the case, we don’t need there to be a God for moral facts to be grounded. Whatever would ground our judgment that God was good, would ground our judgment that anyone was good. And isn’t that what we mean by morality?
In the end, we need to interrogate why theists think we should deem any character good and worth emulating. They cannot say “because he’s God” because God could be horrid. Nor can they say “God can’t be horrid,” not merely because they can’t produce any evidence that’s the case (so there is no reason to believe it), but also because it doesn’t answer the question. “God can’t be any other way” still doesn’t get us to “we should therefore want to emulate God.” You have to build out something more, to explain why “the only possible way God could be, just happens to be by coincidence the way we should want to be too.” And whatever you attempt in order to explain that, always it ends up being something that can be true or exist without a god. Trust me. Try as you might, you will never get anywhere else but there. Wielenberg notices this (e.g. p. 38), but takes the wrong lesson from it, which is, in effect, “if they can catastrophically fail at this, then so can I!” That’s regress, not progress.
The Only Way Morality Can Actually Be Grounded
“What may be true,” Wielenberg says, “is that nihilism is false only if there are basic ethical facts” (p. 39). But that’s probably false. Since a god actually can’t ground moral facts (without appeal to the natural facts of what physically is the case and what things people actually already care about), neither can any “basic moral facts” of Wielenberg’s construction. There is simply no reason to care about them—without appeal to the natural facts of (a) what physically is the case and (b) what things people actually already care about. So always, every single time, that’s where things always land. That’s the only foundation there can ever be or will ever be for being a moral person—and hence, in turn, for ascertaining what a moral person is.
In my work I have used this revelation to arrive at a fairly credible grounding of moral facts in natural facts: reliable human satisfaction management requires empathy and honesty; and all that these theists are doing is projecting their own fears and self-judgments onto God, when really, they would simply hate themselves if they became the very sort of people they hate—or else will delude themselves into false beliefs to hide from their own otherwise inevitable self-loathing; but then the bulk of their moral beliefs would be false. You can only have true moral beliefs if they follow from true factual beliefs. So, telling yourself you are a nice person when you are not, can never truthfully justify your hurtful behavior. Whereas admitting you are not a nice person will conflict with the fact that you don’t like people who aren’t nice—and thus, necessarily, you must admit you do not like who you are. Which then becomes a sufficient reason to stop being what you hate and become something else. These are logically necessary facts of conscious existence. They can’t be avoided in any possible universe.
Which entails that what may be true is, rather, that nihilism is false if ethical facts could only ever derive from natural facts. That’s one more reason, in addition to the two I had you pin above, that we should look around to see if there are any natural facts that have that consequence. And there are. And an additional proof of this is that even theists operate as if this is the case. When they try to give reasons why abortion or homosexuality are wrong, they always list physical facts, things that go poorly in result; and always they appeal to the emotional hostility to those outcomes in the audience. All of these things are natural facts. In these cases, usually false facts; fetuses don’t have minds whereas the women forced to carry them do, and homosexuality is not dysfunctional when not oppressed. Correct these false beliefs back into alignment with reality, and the natural facts the theists claimed supported their position on abortion and homosexuality dissolve; and with those false facts goes their false morality.
Thus, even on theism, morality is grounded in natural facts. And this is true even from the other side of the equation: what people can be rationally and honestly convinced to care about. If people didn’t have any reason to care about what a God supposedly thinks about abortion or homosexuality, then in no way could God’s opinions ground anything regarding that. Because his opinions would then be incapable of justifying, and thus “grounding,” anyone’s behavior or compliance. If no one cares, if God’s opinions mean nothing to them, and there is literally no way by which to explain to them why they should, then there is no true sense in which they “ought” to comply with those opinions. Calling God’s opinions “moral” would then be tautologically arbitrary and meaningless. So people have to already have some values or desires that would motivate their caring before you could ever truthfully argue that they should care. And what people happen to value and desire most, such as would override anything else they may be desiring and preferring already instead, is simply a natural fact about people. And that would be so even if they were engineered by God.
The theist might want at this point to acquiesce, admit moral facts are grounded in natural facts, and complain instead that, well, but for God engineering us in a way we can actually find satisfying if we adhere to His design, but for God arranging the natural facts in a way that’s actually good for us, we’d have come out wrong and would be living self-defeating and dissatisfying, maybe even malicious, dishonest, and horrid lives. But that’s now an empirical claim that can be tested. It tests false. And significantly, it will always test false. Because that is the very nature of personal consciousness: anything with that property is capable of working out what behaviors are self-defeating and dissatisfying and work out what changes in behavior would correct that, particularly in a social system, where cooperative behavior is always the most efficient means to any end (hence The Real Basis of a Moral World and The Objective Value Cascade).
And necessarily, it is always impossible for an advanced civilization to arise—with people even capable of contemplating moral philosophy in the first place—from a people all of whose satisfaction derives from being malicious, dishonest, and horrid. Evolution will wipe them out before ever getting to that state; or else maintain them in the savage state of all other animals. People can only ever get to the point of contemplating moral theory if the bulk of their ancestors were not engineered to derive satisfaction from being malicious, dishonest, and horrid. Nor will they continue to be the sort of people that can care about moral theory if they should start deriving satisfaction from being malicious, dishonest, and horrid, as their descent into extinction or mindless savagery would then be inevitable.
And this tests out empirically: the deeply dissatisfying, hollow and loveless, rage- and disappointment-filled, risk-hosed lives of sociopaths are well-documented; their environments by their own actions become corrupt and hostile and dysfunctional, and thus self-defeating; and even the rare example of one so lucky as to somehow avoid any significant proportion of all of this only proves the rule: only a completely irrational fool banks their entire life satisfaction on being extremely improbably lucky. The choice of being awful has a bad self-outcome so frequently, and so much more frequently than the choice of being benevolent, that only a really bad gambler would bet on being malevolent—and hence, only really bad gamblers do that. The rest of us bet on benevolence. Down that path we find love, resources, friends, and life- and self-satisfaction without delusion, more frequently than down any other path open to us. Rationality therefore compels no other choice.
The theist (and maybe Wielenberg too) is worried that if morality simply derives from what we want, then it is capricious and arbitrary, just a matter of shifting opinion. But that’s a false fear. It’s also moot. Because there has never been any argument for being moral that didn’t appeal to what people wanted. So you had better get with the program and admit we’re already where I am, and have been there for thousands of years. You have to want to be moral (or else want something that entails you will want to be moral once you realize this) for it ever to be true that you ought to be moral. Full stop. They also worry, of course, that the correlation between benevolence and good outcomes and malevolence and bad outcomes, though reliable enough to make rationally clear which is the smarter bet, is nowhere near perfectly reliable (the odds are “good,” not one hundred percent), and that’s annoying. But merely inventing a God who will fix that won’t fix it. Empirically, we already know only one entity exists who actually ever does anything to fix that: us. So you might want to get on that.
If someone wants something (enough to pursue it) that you think is wrong of them to pursue, the only way you can ever argue that fact is either to correct some factual belief they have, or to appeal to some other value they have, something else they want, that they already agree supersedes the other thing you deem wrong to want, and thereby correct some fallacious step of logic in their thinking, by which they overlooked that their behavior is contrary to what they actually will prefer when properly informed and soundly reasoning. Either way, you are grounding moral facts in natural facts: the natural facts of what actually exists or how things actually work, or the natural facts of what a person really wants most in life—or more precisely, what a person would really want most, once they are reaching a conclusion about that without fallacy from only true premises. And if you attempt to argue these things, and you are wrong—if the facts of reality aren’t as you insist they are, if that person doesn’t want anything you claim they do, and still wouldn’t no matter what true facts you inform them of, then there simply aren’t any grounds for your claiming they “should” want what you claim they should. And that means you are the one who is wrong about morality.
Theists don’t like this, because it means they will pretty quickly have to start admitting they are wrong about what is and isn’t moral. They can’t have that, so they delusionally go on about our having to obey the God they invented in their own image or else we’ll have no reason to obey any moral code at all. They are lying. And we should stop taking advice from liars. We don’t need God to justify being moral. Because the way the world really works (and doesn’t), and the things we’ll want most out of life once we know what’s really available (and isn’t), fully suffice to justify and motivate a benevolent disposition in all rational persons. Moral facts then become fully discoverable natural facts—not random ideas we stumble across in our heads (as Wielenberg’s system seems to entail), and definitely not whatever our ignorant, delusional peers or ancestors have fantasized (as all modern theism entails).
Fetuses don’t hav minds?
And how wud u mesur a mind?
If babies wiđin the woom havn’t got minds then how about a bābi wiđout đat’s 1 minit old..
Shud we rimuv brains from pepl in ordar t make killing đm moral ?
It’s bone chilling đis.
A mind is a conscious intergrator of information, particularly about environment and personal identity. No fetus has that until (possibly) the third trimester (when even Roe v. Wade declares it acceptable to outlaw elective abortion).
A brain is an organ that generates and stores a mind.
These are not the same things.
Killing a brain that already has a working mind in it, is killing a mind. The thing fetuses don’t have in the first or second trimester of gestation.
//Fetuses don’t hav minds?//
A fetus has a brain, not a mind. A “mind” is generally defined as that which perceives, structures, and processes subjective information. “Mind” is thus a property of brains (which do a lot more than produce conscious phenomena).
//And how wud u mesur a mind?//
There are many ways to measure a mind, including by the degree of awareness and capabilities of intentional information manipulation. This is very basic—a more complete answer would take reading several dense books. Let me know if you would like a reference.
//If babies wiđin the woom havn’t got minds then how about a bābi wiđout đat’s 1 minit old.//
As explained, they have brains but not yet minds, which do not appear to “come online” until somewhere between week 24 and 28. And even then it isn’t clear that self awareness is yet active.
//Shud we rimuv brains from pepl in ordar t make killing đm moral ?//
Doing anything to destroy a mind, which generally includes damaging or “rimuving” brains, is the very definition of “killing” someone. Everything else about the body can be working perfectly (e.g. the heart pumping, lungs breathing, etc), but if there is no longer any capability or potential for self awareness, then that person is effectively dead.
//It’s bone chilling đis.//
The only bone chilling position here is prioritizing a mindless bundle of cells over a mindful adult.
And before Alif tries to argue that this position justifies infanticide: No one has any right to harm a child after it is birthed because it is no longer in the body of another dependent on it and imposing onto the person whose mind’s brain is in that body; the social harm of infanticide is vastly different from that of abortion, and the ability to deter infanticide with legal action is far greater than that of abortion; and the difference, as Richard put it elsewhere, is between a hypothetical building and a building with a foundation on it. An infant isn’t fully a person yet, but it at least has all the wiring to do so unimpeded barring calamity or some lethal genetic condition. A fetus doesn’t until late in the pregnancy.
Richard is not a fan of the violinist argument, pointing to considerations like conjoined twins, but it’s important to bear in mind the difference between a fetus and conjoined twins. A fetus is a later organism that is distinct from the mother, not a person born simultaneously. Two people have rights to figure out how to share some asset that critically affects them both, which in the case of conjoined twins is their shared body; but one person who has bodily autonomy and then has it invaded without their consent by another has the right to dislodge that other person.
It’s the conjunction of the fact that people have bodily autonomy and the fact that the fetus is both dependent on the mother and not a full person that changes the abortion calculus from the case of conjoined twins.
It seems unnecessary to attempt to provide grounds for objective morality. The observation of the natural order, anthropology and history make it quite clear that morality is an emergent property of a functioning society that operates by consent and is relative to the needs and consent of that society. Starting with the smallest social group the family – and an imperative to protect my gene pool – murder and cannibalism are acceptable survival traits for that pod if they are outside of the familial group. Socially we discover that we need to widen the gene pool to prevent poor mutation which brings in a larger group and survival determines that we do not murder/eat members of the group … larger nomadic groups introduce increasingly stringent rules to ensure the group remains cohesive – an certain activities become verboten as the destabilise the social structure (theft, adultery …) before we reach a settled agrarian society we have a set of rules which reflect (eg) the Ten Commandments – these don’t require a god – but the notion of one with divine consequences may be a useful way to enforce. This scales to agrarian societies dependent on warrior classes to defend them .. .to urban societies. The enforcement of the moral codes is given by the consent of the majority to the trusted few – whether this is warrior class or a lawmaker (priest) class. By the time we get to the 21st century we have drifted through a slew of morally acceptable practices for their times – torture of heretics, stoning, beheadings of enemies, capital punishments, slavery, slaughter of foreigners, punishment of homosexuals, yet each of these is by present standards abhorrent and immoral, yet in their time we’re viewed as just and right. I was asked if I thought that Hitlers slaughter of the Jews therefore was “good” – and for me the answer is no – but clearly for the German society of the 1930s they gave consent for this to be carried out – Hitlers rhetoric persuaded his society to grant that consent – based on the failure of the economy and its harms to that society. It may be uncomfortable to be set into a sea of moral relativism- but stability of society gives the best survival outcomes for individuals and the definition of good/evil just/unjust are derived from the needs of that society and the benefits it grants its members – if I err society will do its best to remove privileges I have – freedom/wealth/power – I cannot freely make “immoral” decisions because there are consequences – in the here and now. In the clash between western and eastern culture we see that variations in social structure lead to similar but differing moral constructs – feudal Japanese ethics and morality were alien to the European world. morals and ethics become a minimisation problem depending on survival outcomes for individuals as a function of the stability of society, That fn will also interact with the fn of competing/cooperative societies and will find stable minima of its own.
Of course it’s necessary. If objective morality has no ground, it then by definition does not exist (that is the ontological function of a ground). And if it does not exist, then all claims that anypne ought to behave a certain way are false.
That reduces all moral language to vacuous descriptive theories with no prescriptive imperative truth-value, e.g. “culture A says B is wrong” can never get you to “you ought to do B” (or not do B). Example: “Conservative Iranian culture says women showing their hair in public is wrong” but you can’t get from that to “Therefore women should not show their hair in public.” Just because some people think a certain thing produces no logical warrant to do it. And if there is no warrant to do anything, no imperative is true. And morality is vacuous if it lacks true imperatives.
You are either contradicting yourself by claiming a ground for morality, or you are nullifying your point by admitting none of this has any imperative force: no one ought to heed any of this. If they ought to, that’s a ground (that’s literally what we are talking about); ergo if there is no ground, it is not true that they ought to heed anything.
And then all you are describing is how people act, not how anyone should act. Which leaves you with no compelling argument that anyone should act any way over any other. Whereas once you try to build such an argument, you are inescapably building a ground.
See Darla the She-Goat, Moral Ontology, and The Real Basis of a Moral World for perspective here.
Are you in agreement with Sam Harris’s point that at it’s core, morality is rooted in the concern for well being of creatures at some conscious level?
And I think you described morality is a man made concept.
If all of that is true then do we really need to dig deeper on this topic (philosophically speaking)?
Doesn’t it really make sense to go any deeper (beyond the practical) then we would with respect to other topics such as the origin and use of language?
Yes. I agree with Harris in almost every respect on this subject, and disagree on only a few details. See Epilogue to the Sam Harris Moral Facts Contest.
Morality is both discovered and invented. Just like mathematics, democracy, science, and nearly everything significant about civilization. See How Can Morals Be Both Invented and True?
And yes. We not only need to dig deeper, we need to end the quiet ban on directing science to study the question of what is and isn’t moral and why. Because science is just philosophy with better data. And we should always want better data. See Shermer vs. Pigliucci on Moral Science.
The entire “God is wise” idea to me demonstrates the extreme danger of theistic attempts at moral grounding. They can’t actually provide a means for grounding. They can’t think about a good reason that would compellingly demand anyone to do anything good by any standard, let alone their own standard which needs to be able to turn a blind eye to things like eternal torture in hell or a relationship with a god who allows evil and yet remains silent. So theistic morality ends up boiling down to “Shut up, don’t think and obey”. It makes even the idea of asking questions and trying to figure out why a wise mind would arrive at a conclusion out to be dangerous and arrogant, if not blasphemous.
One thing I’ve always thought about with your approach is the concern I have that if we just talk about people not wanting to be mean because they don’t like others to be mean it opens up the objection, “But I don’t like others to be mean because I don’t like to suffer. I don’t care when I’m mean because I don’t suffer”. That’s blatantly amoral, and it may be impossible for human people to have healthy understandings of themselves and society without being unable to differentiate themselves and their interests from others so easily, but the latter is an argument that I’d want to see supported by detailed evidence.
I’ve always found that a Buddhist argument helps. If a person is dependent on being cruel to gain happiness (e.g. the kind of person who delights in insults), that person must always be dependent on that ability to retain happiness. They would be better off focusing on themselves, even if there were never any risk of retaliation.
As for Wielenburg, I think it helps to point out that we can describe a set of states that we call “justice” and distinguish them from “injustice”, but those are just labels. No law of nature would prevent us from inverting those labels if they were arbitrary. We can think of a system that has equity, for example, where there’s difference in outcomes that are measured and connected to predictable rules. But why should we care about that as opposed to inequity?
I wrote a response to this post here https://benthams.substack.com/p/erik-wielenberg-and-how-richard-carrier?s=w
I don’t understand your response.
The sequence of events goes like this:
(1) Theists insist morality must have a ground in the sense of a fully motivating reason to adhere to it.
(2) Wielenberg writes a paper purporting to explain how morality has such a ground without God.
(3) Nowhere in that paper does Wielenberg explain how morality has such a ground without God.
All your response does is reiterate step 3, basically saying “he did something else instead.” But that doesn’t change steps 1 and 2. So you haven’t actually addressed anything my article is about. I am not objecting to “having done something else instead.” I’m objecting to his failing to do 1 despite having affirmed 2. Especially since atheists keep doing this and it is rhetorically disastrous.
Wielenberg doesn’t even seem to be aware of the actual content of 1 (as even you admit: “The question of why we should care about morality is not one that Wielenberg tackles to the best of my knowledge”). Which is my article’s thesis. You thus are affirming my article’s thesis. Which is the exact opposite of responding to it.
You may perhaps not be paying attention to what these theists are saying, just as Wielenberg isn’t. You seem to think they “aren’t” doing (1). But they absolutely are. And it is failing to pay attention to what they are actually saying that is the problem my article is calling out.
William Lane Craig is very explicit about this. So is J.P. Moreland (I have a whole section with quotations from him on the point in Sense and Goodness without God, pp. 313ff.).
Wielenberg seems not to understand what these theists are saying. Neither do you, evidently. As Craig puts it, “why should we act morally, especially when it conflicts with self-interest?” His argument is, “if God does not exist, then morality is just a human convention, that is to say, morality is wholly subjective and non-binding” (emphasis added to illustrate the part you and Wielenberg are somehow not paying attention to).
As Justin Brierley puts it (someone who very definitely does understand what Craig and Moreland are saying): “why do we believe human life should be valued? … I find it very difficult to come up with a convincing answer on an atheistic worldview.” Should. Why should we care. That’s the grounding they are talking about in the Moral Argument for God. This quote is from Brierley’s section on that in his new and popular book; and he represents a good example of an intelligent man you and Wielenberg are leaving trapped in delusion by not answering his actual concern.
It is not possible for a statement like “you ought to do x” to be true unless it is actually the case that “you ought to do x.” Which means explaining how the proposition exists and makes sense does not address the question. What we want to know is why we should agree we ought to do x; in what sense is it true.
Thus explaining where the idea of “you ought to do x” comes from, how the mere idea of it is ontologically grounded, does not address how it is morally grounded. Because the mere existence of “you ought to do x” as a concept does not address the question of whether that statement is true. Thus when theists ask for a moral ground, they are not asking for the ontology of ideas about morality (the only thing you and Wielenberg are giving us). They are asking for what makes moral statements true. And “you ought to do x” can only be true if you actually ought to do x, which requires being sufficiently justified in doing x. If a rationally informed person does not agree we ought to do x, then it is simply not true that we should. And this is what theists are talking about.
That you still don’t get this is precisely the serious problem in this subject field my article is trying to call out and put a stop to. You need to start paying attention to what theists are saying and why it is having a rhetorical effect on people. If, that is, you want fewer people to be seduced into the theistic delusion.
I don’t deny that that is one of the arguments made by theists. However, they both think that atheist can’t provide an account of morality existing AND separately that atheists can’t explain why we should be moral even if it exists. Wielenberg’s paper addresses the first point, not the second one. In the article you linked Craig says:
In his Kagan debate Craig explicitly distinguishes those two points. At 58:13 Craig says:
In this debate, Craig explicitly distinguishes moral values with moral responsibility, and says atheism can’t account for either.
Craig’s remarks here seem to show this (specifically the points between “Consider, then, first…” and “discrimination, and oppression.”
I would agree with you that separately the question of why we should be moral is one that atheists should address, but it’s not what Wielenberg was addressing.
I really don’t understand how you continue to not hear what I am saying. This is bizarre.
Theists have no trouble understanding how moral systems can exist without God. Craig talks about many ways they can (social norms, for example). Their concern is with how we are to know which moral system is true. Not simply that moral systems exist. And this is the failure of comprehension my article is about. None of your examples even argue the contrary: they all confirm my point. They all show Craig concerned with why we should believe any moral system is true; not merely whether it exists.
For example, your cherry-picked quote from the Kagan debate is Craig issuing an a fortiori conditional, that even if there is some objective sense in which moral facts exist (even though his two other arguments deny this), they still won’t be grounded, i.e. there will be no reason to care about them. Craig is not there saying such an objective sense exists (his other two arguments are posed to refute it); he is saying that even if somehow an atheist could produce any such sense, it still wouldn’t establish a ground for morality, and thus still does not answer his argument. It’s thus especially weird even after having been told that for you to still continue making the same mistake he just told you to stop making.
It is this concern that is what neither you nor Wielenberg are answering. Craig keeps stating this concern, over and over, in different words and different framing, even giving three separate arguments for it in the Kagan debate, and still you ignore him. And that is a serious problem if you intend to actually argue against what theists are saying. Ignoring what they are saying doesn’t cut it. You are wasting everyone’s time with this. It has to stop. Answer their argument. Or admit you have no answer. Those are your only options.
To illustrate what I mean, in your own linked transcript Craig says (emphasis mine):
Likewise in the Kagan debate; start at timestamp 24:30, and actually listen to what Craig says:
What sense does he mean? In the sense of having any reason to care about them—to agree they are true—apart from the mere social happenstance of your subjective beliefs. He just gave an elaborate example explaining that. And he then gives an elaborate ontological reason why God’s being loving et al. entails agreement that the values of God should be emulated. This is about why be moral. It is not about whether the values of a god merely “exist.” That is why he dismisses the Euthyphro. God’s having a certain nature, he argues, compels our agreement with God’s judgments.
Hence you and Wielenberg are ignoring Craig’s first actual argument here.
As he says immediately after all that:
In other words, why care? That’s what he is asking. Why do you keep ignoring this?
One can easily question Craig’s argument (he is covertly appealing to subjective emotions in his audience here, and thus not actually producing the “objective” grounds that he claims); but I am here only articulating what his argument is. This is the argument you and Wielenberg are not responding to. He is claiming without God there is no reason to care about any moral standards, regardless of where you “find” those standards. Whereas if there is a God, his being a great and kind person and creator of you and the world is a good reason to care about his values. Again, I am not saying this is a sound argument; I am simply describing what his argument is, the argument you need to be answering and not ignoring.
As Craig closes that first tack:
What does Craig mean by “true”? He just explained in detail: having an actual motive to adhere to it, as opposed to some alternative morality or none. So why keep ignoring him? This is his argument. Let’s please stop ignoring it and actually address it already.
Then at timestamp 31:40 we get to tack two:
What does he mean? He immediately gives examples illustrating there are lots of things you could do that are good for you, so you have no reason to choose any over any others, and thus no reason to care about any particular duties called “moral.” Unless there is a God. This is about why care. It is not about whether some ideas about duties exist. Hence Craig continues:
To say we “have no” duties is to say we have no reason to adhere to those duties. They are not obligatory. This is about why care. It is not about whether the idea of duties “exists” in some sense. God, Craig goes on to explain, does provide a basis for caring about these duties, because they derive from his commandments, which “flow from his moral nature” and so “on this foundation we can affirm the objective rightness of love” etc. In other words, not merely acknowledge that the standard “exists,” but that it is correct—meaning that it is to be preferred over alternative assessments. A reason to care. That is what Craig is arguing. Without God, “we have no moral obligations.” In other words, we have no reason to adhere to any moral commands.
As Craig outright says:
Reasons to be moral. That’s what he’s talking about. Plain and simple.
That leaves his third tack, about accountability as a motive to be moral, which you just admitted also confirms my point so I needn’t demonstrate it further.
All three of Craig’s arguments are three different ways to frame the same claim: that only God provides a reason to care about being moral. The first, that God is a really nice bloke and made you in his image and shit, so that gives you reason to care about emulating his nature. The second, that, God being that, then he must know what he is doing when he tells us to do certain stuff rather than other stuff, so that gives you reason to care about obeying his commandments. And third, that God ensures accountability, therefore you should care about his morality lest it go badly for you. Three different reasons for the same conclusion: God provides a reason to be moral; atheism does not.
And in the Moral Argument for God, it’s an even stronger thesis: that we cannot even explain why we think these things about morality had there not been a God. God provides a causal account not only of why we have the moral intuitions we do but also justifies our belief that those intuitions are true (otherwise, as Craig says, evolution might have caused those intuitions but then they’d be “an illusion,” as there’d be no reason to believe they were true: hence merely existing doesn’t cut it for Craig; that is not what he is concerned about). You and Wielenberg are just ignoring Craig top to bottom. You are ignoring all three of his arguments to the same conclusion. And that’s really weird. And counter-productive. You need to stop.
Craig is saying that there’s no robust grounding of morality absent God that makes any moral view true. He thinks that accounts based on social norms are inadequate.
Just to be clear, what is not in dispute is the following
1) Craig argues that absent God we have no reason to care about morality.
2) Wielenberg’s and my article don’t address that argument.
However, what we disagree about is
3) Craig thinks that morality can’t exist objectively absent God. Wielenberg argues against this, claiming that moral platonism can give an account of moral systems being objectively true, independent of human social norms.
The quote I gave stressed that those objections were separate things–he makes distinct claims that he distinguishes explicitly.
Your claim of cherry-picking is bizarre given that he made this distinction very explicit in his opening statement repeatedly, even clearly distinguishing between the different claims by explicit label.
Craig twice says morality can exist without God: he discusses morality as social construct and as a biologically evolved “her morality.”
Why do you keep claiming otherwise? This is bizarre, Matthew.
Craig argues that socially originated moral sentiments and biologically evolved moral sentiments give us no reason to prefer or follow them (over any other morals, or none). Craig is thus not saying these moralities can’t exist (he even explicitly says several times that moralities can exist without God; I sent you direct quotes here!). To the contrary, he is saying there is no reason to prefer them to any other (or none). I have documented this with bold print quotations from Craig. Continuing to deny this makes no sense. I really don’t know what you are on about at this point.
You say
“Likewise in the Kagan debate; start at timestamp 24:30, and actually listen to what Craig says:
My first claim is, that if there is no God, then moral values are not objective in that sense.
What sense does he mean? In the sense of having any reason to care about them—to agree they are true—apart from the mere social happenstance of your subjective beliefs. He just gave an elaborate example explaining that. And he then gives an elaborate ontological reason why God’s being loving et al. entails agreement that the values of God should be emulated.”
The sense he means is a categorical sense–not just hypothetical imperatives, but actual categorical ones. So there are three possible conceptions of morality that say
1 Morality is just a description of humans wanting stuff and made up rules
2 Morality describes what we should do to be moral, but reason alone doesn’t compel us to be moral
3 Reason alone does compel us to be moral.
He is using morality here describing the possibility of moving from 1 to 2, not from 2 to 3. That’s what Wielenberg was adressing.
You say
“But if God does not exist, what basis remains for objective moral values—in particular, why think that human beings would have moral worth? … On atheism I can’t see any reason to think that human wellbeing is objectively good, any more than insect wellbeing [etc.] …
In other words, why care? That’s what he is asking. Why do you keep ignoring this?
One can easily question Craig’s argument (he is covertly appealing to subjective emotions in his audience here, and thus not actually producing the “objective” grounds that he claims); but I am here only articulating what his argument is. This is the argument you and Wielenberg are not responding to. He is claiming without God there is no reason to care about any moral standards, regardless of where you “find” those standards. Whereas if there is a God, his being a great and kind person and creator of you and the world is a good reason to care about his values. Again, I am not saying this is a sound argument; I am simply describing what his argument is, the argument you need to be answering and not ignoring.”
He’s not asking why care. He’s again asking how we get to claim 2, rather than claim 3.
If we take morality to be about what we would care about if we were totally rational and impartial, then the difference between 2 and 3 is that 3 asks why we should care about the things that we’d care about if we were fully rational and impartial, and 2 asks whether there is a fact of the matter about what we’d care about if we were fully rational and impartial.
On your account, I’m not sure what the difference would be between his first and third arguments.
Your other quotations seem easily explainable on this account.
So just to be clear, Craig’s arguments are basically
1) Atheism can’t explain why Jeffrey Dahmer did things that were bad.
2) Even if it could, it can’t explain why we’re under any obligation to do good rather than bad.
3) Even if it could do both of those, it can’t explain why we should follow our moral obligations layed out in two.
If Wielenberg really was missing the point like you say, it would be unlikely that he’d write and publish a book on it–it’s non responsiveness would be totally ignored by publishers. Even if that happened, it would be even stranger that this total non sequitor to Craig’s argument would be missed even by Craig himself, who gives objections to Wielenberg’s view, but never claims it doesn’t address his own at all.
If you want to see atheists dismantle Craig’s arguments about why we should care about morality even if it’s objective, see the Kagan debate. Craig’s arguments for that claim were almost laughably poor.
That isn’t relevant to this discussion (whether Craig is a theistic utilitarian, per his argument 3 v. Kagan, or a theistic deontologist, per his arguments 1 and 2, makes no difference to my article’s point). But if you want my take on attempts to argue that, see Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same.
All that matters to this discussion is what Moreland and Craig said. Your speculations about what they can and can’t say are irrelevant. To respond to what they said, you have to listen to what they said. That’s my point—the entire point of my article, and the entire point of this discussion about it here.
False. Craig is arguing 3. And he is explicitly arguing 3 in all three of his arguments for 3.
That you keep ignoring this is what I am calling you all out for. Continuing to ignore it does not answer my call out. It simply confirms it.
No. He is not, Matthew. Craig is consistently talking about why we should obey any morality, and especially any one over any other. He explains this in massive detail, with numerous statements, numerous examples, numerous ontological framings.
I cannot explain why you continue to not grasp this. I have shown you Craig’s exact words. I have documented and timestamped all his examples. That you still aren’t listening to what Craig says is simply bizarre. Please stop. Please start actually paying attention to what Craig actually said. Seriously.
You just refuted this claim. You yourself continue to fail to grasp what Craig is saying, so it’s empirically established to not be unlikely.
I have empirically refuted your claim here, with evidence. I believe in evidence. Not armchair assertions about what you think is likely. I attend to the facts. Please do so too. And empirically refuting this claim is what my article is about. And your response fails to address any of this. It just repeats the error my article calls out.
I attended a salon recently (just last week) where Wielenberg defended this paper to a whole room of philosophers. And they all agreed with me: he seems not to actually be producing anything relevant to the debate. They tried multiple angles of argument getting him to see that if he doesn’t provide any sufficient reason to be moral, he isn’t arguing anything that Craig and Moreland are asking for. As one put it, point blank, “I don’t see what this adds [to the debate].”
Please take the blinders off and listen.
And I watched the Kagan debate years ago. It’s one of the best defeats of Craig ever and I have long said so. That Craig’s arguments are terrible is not relevant here. I already told you they were.
It does not matter how bad an argument is, if you simply never even respond to it. And you and Wielenberg simply aren’t. Kagan did. He deployed a version of social contract theory to ground morality in the sense Craig demanded, something Wielenberg has never done, not even by any means, much less that one. Note my article does not list Kagan as an example of the problem. It lists Wielenberg as an example of the problem. Please stick to what my article was about.
Try it this way, Matthew.
We all can agree that at least some Nazis thought that what they were doing was “right”, even if in some beleaguered and hateful sense, I hope. They had a belief system that they viewed as a true morality. They thought that they would actually produce good outcomes for the stakeholders they felt had moral rights.
We don’t just disagree with Nazis about the facts. We disagree with their morality. Even if large amounts of Jews were in fact dangerous outsiders rather than ordinary people living in their societies with just as much patriotism as anyone else, that would be no reason for their death or even imprisonment. One would still need to try individual traitors. The lazy racist collective responsibility isn’t just a fallacy of reification, but also gross moral reasoning.
The Nazis had a morality. We can say it was internally inconsistent, but that isn’t relevant here. It was false.
But now that we’ve said that, and are abandoning a subjective moral grounding, what are we doing to differentiate sources?
Wielenberg and others can cite potential ways that people reason morally. But the theist is saying that those reasons aren’t reasons. They are arbitrary. They are not meta-ethically grounded.
If I say that in basketball you shouldn’t travel, you can tell me “Who cares? I don’t play basketball”. You can reject the rule set as being some you don’t want to play by, while acknowledging that the rule set is real, and codified, and even internally consistent and possibly relatively complete.
That’s why Richard gave the Star Wars example. Someone like Wielenberg can point to true facts of human cognition that neither empirically nor ethically actually mandate the implied behavior. “You like Star Wars” is actually no reason to redecorate your room to match it. You may also want to do that, but the mere liking is essentially tangential to the decision to redecorate. It’s at best necessary but not sufficient, and even then not that.
Even if someone like Craig isn’t arguing the 1, 2 and 3, and I think he is, some theist can. So ethical theorists need to have a reason to say “You should pick basketball over the other games you could play” or to translate, “You should choose X moral code, and here’s why”. That’s why Craig used the term “human illusion”. Morality could be like driving left or right on the road: it’s a convention, not something actually true. (Of course, it being a convention comes from true facts, which provides the clue here: you can prove that the choice between one of two conventions is arbitrary, but that all other choices are drastically sub-optimal in comparison). We need, *at the minimum, reasons to select moral conventions (which is the basis of things like political and economic and sociological theory), and preferably reasons to think that they’re not mere conventions at all. That’s what Craig is priming his audience to be afraid of not having.
I think your interpretation of Craig is wrong. However, I feel like our exchange so far has largely covered that. I do agree with you that atheists do often miss the point of the moral argument, and only do what Wielenberg did, when responding to the other elements of the moral argument is needed.
To partially rectify this, I have written an article about how terrible the moral argument is here. Unless I deeply misunderstand what you are saying, what I argue in this article seems to be what you think atheists should do more.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-does-william-lane-craigs-brain?s=w
Near the end you point out, and I agree, “the only way you can ever argue that fact is either to correct some factual belief they have, or to appeal to some other value they have,”
You might have another blog there. I find that a lot of people (and I mostly hang with Lefties, but everyone does it) stop at the “factual belief” option. Even if I tell them that the facts show that it’s very difficult to change someone’s mind by presenting facts, they will ignore that fact and keep telling me about the YouTube I should watch, again.
I think facts and values are tied together in a way most people don’t see. The values that we form early in life steer us toward finding facts to validate them and seeking education that is in line with those values. I believe you’ve implied this before, but not sure if you’ve laid it out in detail anywhere.
Maybe. I’m not sure which feature of human psychology you are referencing.
There is the question of value disagreement vs. factual disagreement, such that an episemically rational person will agree on a moral conclusion if they agree on the facts and share the same values relating to it, e.g. abortion. But this is unrelated to the epistemic problem: motivated reasoning—e.g. values unrelated to abortion—causing people to refuse to believe, and fiercely resist, any correction on the facts.
So two people can share the same values but still sharing facts won’t change minds because they are devoted to not accepting the actual facts (they are resistant to evidence and reason itself).
Here, it is that people need certain things to be true; not that they differ in valuing human life, but differ in wholly unrelated values that require defending an ego- or identity-position.
There is no philosophical solution to this. It’s a psychological problem. People have to agree on epistemic values before they can agree on facts; wholly apart from the moral values one would then appeal to in response to the facts.
I cover this somewhat in What’s the Harm, Vital Primer on Media Literacy, and Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning.
Richard, I genuinely want to read your blog, and I came here for that reason, but I seriously can’t because your grammar is terrible! In particular, you often use a full stop and a end a sentence with a full stop and start a new sentence with a capital letter, the new sentence is often a continuation of the previous sentence. This is unnecessarily confusing and disorienting.
I’m sure you’re more than capable of doing better. You speak much better than you write, and I know you have a PhD, so I’m wondering whether there is an explanation other than poor writing skills. Perhaps this is an unedited machine transcription from an audio recording. If so, you have underestimated the value of human editing. Maybe you’re trying to achieve an informal effect to connect with your less educated audience. If so, I don’t think it’s working, and you should give higher priority to clarity. If you are trying to avoid ovely long sentences, you need to do a bit more than simply swapping commas with a full stops and capitalising the next letter.
I discovered you on Youtube, I am interested in your work, and I am here to find out more about it. I haven’t yet read any of your books, and I expect you would have a professional editor. Nevertheless, I find the idea of reading your books much less appealing after reading this example of your blog. Your content is interesting, but your bad writing is a major turn-off.
I don’t expect perfection; I don’t care whether you split infinitives, and I have not taken much time to edit this post. I’m sure you could find several errors with my writing, and I could probably find more. I think the difference is that your writing is so bad that it’s below the threshold of readability, and I believe it would be well worth the small amount of time and effort you would need to fix the problem. For me, writing this post is a good deed with a high likelihood of being ignored. For you, it’s you’re job.
You need to consider the structure of each sentence. It will become natural and effortless with practice. I recommend that you word your sentences in such a way that if somebody listened to you read your blog aloud, they would not have to guess where the full stops are. If you have started a sentence with the word “And”, “But” or “Because”, you should probably use a comma instead.
I would have preferred to send this message to a private email address rather than on a public forum. I don’t care whether you reply, and I have said everything I think I needed to say — except for thanks for the educational, interesting and entertaining public debates you have participated in. The world very much needs your kind of free and clear thinking.
This is elitist nonsense. As long as what we write is intelligible (and it will be if you speak it out in your head; e.g. if you actually listen to what is being said, rather than just pedantically look for punctuation, which does not exist in spoken speech), it’s good to go.
I suggest you get over your petty hangups and just read texts as written, and not grammar-police their punctuation. Perhaps you have an actual mental disability in this regard. If so, seek therapeutic help with that. You will feel better. And be able to listen to what people are saying instead of winging over the irrelevancies of their sentences’ syntacical protocols.
I just found your reply. I appreciate its readability, although not its personal attacks and your use of “mental disability” as a slur. Looking back at my own comment, I’m a little surprised I took the time to write so much. I think it was motivated by my enthusiasm for your work. I remember enjoying your debates and lectures, and how surprisingly unreadable your writing was. I can’t be the only one to have ever told you that.
Your response was almost entirely based on mistaken assumptions. My background is of multigenerational poverty, including my own life so far. I would be happy to make the extra effort to read the writings of someone who struggle with literacy. I didn’t think that was the case with you becsause you have a PhD… If that it is an issue for you, I apologize. I understand that there are reasons beyond themselves why many people don’t have the opportunity to realise their potential.
I don’t care about petty rules of grammar either, and I’m not attached to the English language. Let it change and evolve for all I care. I resent the fact that I learned English instead of the languages if my own parents, because of racist policies and attitudes to “assimilation” of migrants. This makes me more negative in some ways about English. I do however much prefer comprehensibility of what I read.
Your suggestion to mentally listen to your writing is possible for you because your writing habits are from your own mind. The problem for others is that without normal full stops, it’s often not possible to know when a sentence begins and ends. It becomes much more ambiguous. I get it when full stops are used for emplasis etc. un a tweet or SMS, but this is on another level.
In an extended piece of writing, if full stops don’t indicate when a sentence begins or ends, it’s too ambiguous to read aloud or listen mentally. Pauses, pitch, tone of voice and emphasis need to be different depending on where the sentence starts and ends. Without normal full stops, it’s hard to know how a sentence should sound. It’s a lot more mental work for the reader than it needs to be. Again, you wouldn’t experience that because you wrote it.
Now I remember why I wrote so much. It’s hard to explain concisely, I’m bothering to write this because I want to help you to communicate more effectively in writing, despite your insults and false assumptions.