Yesterday I dealt with Bernardo Kastrup’s weird Idealism. Today I have just a simple thought to offer on why the equally weird theology of Alvin Plantinga is fatally incoherent, building on two prior articles of mine: Is a Good God Logically Impossible?, where I analyze James Sterba’s book of that title (finding that in essentials it’s spot on, erring only on one point of semantic trivia), and How Not to Live in Zardoz, where I analyze what one might have thought was a completely different question (how we can live in simverses without getting trapped in a psychopathic hell). It turns out, these connect. And they connect in a particularly useful way for refuting Plantinga’s Free Will Defense of Evil (which is indifferent to what free will actually is, so I won’t digress on that here).
The Point about Strategy
Because human beings are universally irrational and often delusional, the truth is not inherently persuasive. It is easy to escape admitting the truth or its consequences. Indeed it gets easier the more copious or complicated that truth is, because there is “so much of it” that it is easy to just lazily dismiss it all, or straw man it, or “choose your adventure” and nitpick one thing and ignore the rest, and every other strategy people use to avoid any causal effect of learning the truth. Critical thinking is hard; and requires genuine commitment. People are lazy. And disinclined to commit to anything they find uncomfortable. So there is a strategic value to single-point arguments: they can be truths that are more effective at changing minds, not because they are comprehensive, but precisely because they are not. The art of persuasion is not the same thing as the art of telling the truth.
Hence having an incomplete but slam-dunk point is rhetorically and emotionally useful. And to illustrate what I mean, I’ll first start with an analogy. While we do need to know all the ways that biblical morality is flawed, toxic, or bankrupt, and we do need to know where moral facts really come from and what they really are, it is psychologically more persuasive if we can slam dunk the point with a single irrefutable example: slavery. This was an approach Matt Dillahunty developed, and it’s pretty effective. Imagine our world, and an alternative one identical in every way (every single way), but one: in that world, the Biblical God consistently condemns slavery (rather than consistently endorses and even occasionally commands it), complete with reasons why His People must never practice it and instead always morally condemn it. In which world is that God more moral? There is no honest way around the answer: the non-existent God is more moral. Which entails any existent God cannot be moral. Mic drop. You’re done.
Needless to say the cognitive dissonance that creates is literally painful. So Christians, thus cornered, and being trapped in a delusion, will resort to absurd and illogical defenses to try and keep believing their God isn’t evil (literally, a vile slavemaster who is utterly against basic human rights). The three most common approaches are to defend slavery as somehow actually moral (at which point the Christian has lost all moral ground and thereby advertised their religion to everyone as morally repugnant) or to change the subject with a tu quoque fallacy (which advertises to everyone that the Christian has no response to the point) or to ironically resort to moral relativism and claim God “couldn’t” preach any true morality to the ancient Israelites because they were too primitive then or the culture was different then—or whatever illogical excuse. Which directly contradicts their claim that the Bible contains true moral guidance, and thus they have just refuted their own religion. Ouch.
Of course, usually what atheists will point out is not that (even though that is a more decisive kill, destroying the inner logic of the entire religion), but that the excuse doesn’t even make sense: if God can insist (even under pain of death) that the Israelites follow such difficult and bizarre rules as not eating bacon or picking up sticks on Saturday, surely he can teach them slavery is wrong (with, indeed, the same ruthless insistence); moreover, ancient Israelites are no less intellectual humans than anyone else today, or in ancient China, who were more than able to accept and understand that slavery is wrong. If you can teach that to a baby today; you could teach it to a baby then. So the excuse doesn’t work, no matter which way you look at it. The fatal weakness of this excuse is thus, again, a self-defeat, advertising to all watching that Christianity is internally incoherent—and cannot get its God out of being evil (even as a fictional character).
Yes, desperate Christians can try every rabbit hole here. For example, they can try digging in on the tu quoque argument and insist atheists can’t make moral judgments, etc. But that Christians have to resort to that destroys its appeal to potential converts. That strategy is designed only to keep Christians from leaving, not spread the faith. That mission was already killed by losing the argument. All the rabbit holes after that just reveal how screwed the Christian is, exposing the lengths they have to go to to avoid admitting that. Which is not a good look to outsiders. But even those who care whether the rabbit holes get anywhere will find, of course, that they do not. They all end the same way.
For example, atheists are judging the Christian God here by the Christian’s own moral standards, and thus the observed internal incoherence cannot be escaped by complaining that atheists have nothing to replace it with. You cannot claim atheists don’t get to use the word “evil,” because it’s the Christian who is making these claims about their God, and the atheist is simply pointing out that their own definitions entail fatal contradictions in their entire worldview. But also, of course, it isn’t true anyway. Atheists can certainly use the word “evil,” because they have a universal definition all peoples, of all religions and none, agree with, and which makes or entails no appeal to gods or the supernatural: evil is simply any malignancy or malevolence. If it causes needless suffering, we disapprove of it. And so, even if you should insist that atheists can only say this is a subjective opinion, it remains true as a subjective opinion: if we disapprove of needless suffering, and your God inflicts needless suffering, we cannot approve of your God. You therefore aren’t going to sell us on him. You are just stumping for Hitler. However much you insist “But Hitler was right” isn’t going to appeal. It’s just going to make us dislike you even more.
Ultimately, trying to sell a gross and toxic religion, once it is exposed as gross and toxic, simply isn’t going to work. Your religion’s days are numbered, once that curtain is pulled and everyone sees it as malignant. That’s why you need all those dubious apologetics to try and rescue your slavemaster God from being evil, rather than simply admitting evil is the new good. And that is why single-point slam-dunks like Dillahunty’s point, that God cannot be both good and someone who endorsed slavery, are so effective: they isolate the problem to a single point, thus preventing Christians from hiding in a maze of constant subject-changes, allowing them to disguise any apologetic as sound. With a single point of focus, it is easier to keep pointing out that none of their excuses are logical, and only further expose the bankruptcy of their entire worldview. And audiences of all intellectual levels will start to see that (as long as you don’t fall for their trick of changing the subject, but stay ever-on-point).
The Point about Plantinga
In Is a Good God Logically Impossible? I analyzed James Sterba’s already-decisive refutation of Plantinga’s Free Will Defense against the Argument from Evil thus:
Allowing freedom actually consequentially results in greatly reducing it.
For example, allowing tyrants freedom to take power and oppress a population results in a vast net reduction in freedom. If physically restraining me from doing my will violates my free will, then allowing someone to physically restrain me violates my free will. God therefore cannot use “free will” as an excuse not to intervene. To the contrary, if “free will” is really so supremely important, that fact would compel him to intervene a great deal more than he is observed to do, specifically in order to maximize the abundance of free will.
After all, a free society contains more unrestrained free will than an oppressed one, obviously. That one must violate some free will to maintain a free society is a logically necessary fact (e.g. tyrants, killers, slavers must be thwarted in their designs); but if the goal is to reduce violations of free will, a good ruler must do this. Not doing so has the opposite result—and thus cannot be justified by any principle on which maximizing free will is the greater good.
One could extend this even to natural evils—which [Plantinga’s] Free-Will Defense has never plausibly accounted for. Indeed Sterba has a closing chapter on natural evil that addresses the difficulties it adds to theism. Merely among which are the fact that such evils produce violations of free will on a massive scale: killing people without their consent certainly violates their free will; as does inflicting them with disease; crippling someone without their consent—especially mentally but more obviously also when physically—certainly impedes their freedoms, no differently than binding them in chains or beating them with sticks; taking away one’s hard-earned property by disaster leaves them less free than people who were able to avoid that same fate by having access to protective resources; and so on. If a good God really would value “free will” above all else, then we would not see the world around us that we do—directly contrary to Plantinga’s thesis. His excuse is thus self-refuting. It leads not to a justification of god, but to an even more glaring logical contradiction between his god as-defined and what we observe.
Sterba demonstrates this result holds even for moral evil…
Sterba further points out that thwarting the effects of immoral acts does not even qualify as violating anyone’s free will. Making me invulnerable to disease with a vaccine does not violate my free will. Just as making me invulnerable to a murderer’s bullets would not. Which means God’s just making us all immune to disease wouldn’t violate anyone’s free will, and thus his failure to do so cannot be justified. But it would not even violate a murderer’s will to make me as immune to bullets as to disease—any more than putting me in a bullet proof vest would. No one would dare argue bullet proof vests are immoral and should be banned because they violate the free will of gunmen who wish to shoot at people. They can shoot at them all they want. Their will is free. Their evil is also thwarted. The Free-Will Defense is thus defunct. It can no more justify God, than it would justify you preventing anyone wearing a bullet proof vest. Indeed your doing so would make you evil, not good. Plantinga’s argument thus does likewise to God.
The perverse flaw in Platinga’s Free-Will Defense is that it entails a nightmarish anarcho-libertarian worldview wherein if I have the physical means to kill or abuse you, I therefore in effect have the moral right to do so, because no one ought take any measure to stop me—in fact it would be their doing so that’s evil, not the act of a good person. Because maintaining my freedom is a greater good than thwarting my victim’s fate. But this flips around the entire meaning of good and evil, turning every act we deem good, evil; and every act we deem evil, good.
Plantinga’s Free-Will Defense is thus another semantic trick: he actually is defining his god as a horrific monster, and simply “chooses” to call being a horrific monster “good.” All just to avoid admitting to himself that he admires a horrific monster. Placing freedom above justice quite simply is evil. For evil is by definition the absence of justice. Just as placing freedom above respecting people’s well being is the absence of goodness, precisely because respecting people’s well being is what goodness means. Freedom is only good when thwarting it would do more harm than exercising it, thus we thwart murder but not speech, rape but not consent, theft but not commerce, and so on; recognizing this distinction is literally what goodness and justice are.
Sterba thus shows that Plantinga’s god as-defined cannot be good. It is a logical impossibility. Therefore one must abandon that definition and retreat to some other conception of a good god, for there to be any logical possibility of one.
This is a powerful point. And it is conclusive. But you will notice it’s long and has many parts. And I’m just summarizing Sterba’s case, which is chapters long, not just paragraphs. This is no discredit to my summary or his argument. We’re just respecting the truth and being as thorough as the medium allows. But notice how it affords many escape routes to the lazy or the delusional. It takes work to vet what we’ve said and honestly think through any knee-jerk reactions to it you may have. It provides many opportunities to avoid the conclusion by nitpicking some minor detail, and constantly changing the subject, so as to avoid ever admitting (or even realizing) that you are cornered. It has lots of rabbit holes to flee into, numerous semantic tricks to playground in, and all the other strategies people employ to avoid confronting what they’ve just been told.
But there is a way to Dillahunty this.
And that comes from my article How Not to Live in Zardoz. I realized this a while ago when I started linking to that article when making the point that we already know what more morally designed worlds would look like—and it isn’t the one we are in. In my Zardoz article I set aside the whole ridiculous debate over spaceghosts and ask a more practical question: when we atheists do eventually create the only possible eternal heaven that there will be, how do we prevent it becoming a hell? The answer is, really, the same as any moral God would have arrived at. Because God by definition would have far more resources, and far less fallibility, than human engineers, and thus could only do the same thing better. It therefore is no longer arguable that he “had” to do it so much worse (as our present world is, by comparison with what well-designed simworlds can be).
I won’t belabor all the ways this is true—though, per my strategic point, we should do that, just not here, as here we are talking about persuasion, not learning, and one needs first be persuaded before they will be willing to learn. I will instead take one single point from my Zardoz article: the safe room. Which I detailed there under the heading of the “Law of Inviolable Escape” but can summarize here as: every person, whenever they themselves choose, can teleport to an inviolable safe room, where they will be comfortable and their basic needs met, and no villain can reach them (and this is by the individual’s choice, hence exercising their free will that God is supposed to respect). Let’s suppose that this comes with one other rule, which is that whenever you choose to leave your safe room, you will be teleported to a relatively safe spot in a randomly selected city, and thus have to make your way home (or to the authorities or whatever else). And we’ll call those two rules the Saferoom Law.
Now, imagine our world, and an alternative one identical in every way (every single way), but one: that world is governed by one more law of physics, the Saferoom Law. And assume each world was created by a God. In which world is that God more moral? There is no honest way around the answer: that non-existent God is more moral. Which entails any existent God cannot be moral.
Mic drop. You’re done.
You can’t get around this with Plantinga’s defense, because the world governed by the Saferoom Law preserves more free will than our world does. Victims have the free will to escape villains. And there is nothing logically impossible about the Saferoom Law. We will be able to enact it when we make our worlds (the simworlds, or virtual worlds, we will eventually some day live in). And we are far less capable than God. So God has no excuse not to have commanded our world obey the Saferoom Law. You can’t defend this by saying villains should have the right to victimize people, because that simply isn’t true. Villains may have the right to freely choose to attack people; but they do not have the right to kill or harm them thereby. On no moral theory (especially the Christian’s own moral theory) is it moral to enable the wills of villains at the expense of the wills of victims. In that context, the only free will it is moral to preserve is the victim’s. And so on down the line: no matter what excuse you come up with (no matter what rabbit hole you attempt to flee into), the same end will befall you. I recently went through the rubbish heap of Christian attempts to explain away evil in Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism? In every case, if you think it through, you’ll realize none of them can explain why our world is not governed by the Saferoom Law—if it was designed by a morally good God.
In the Saferoom World, villains still have the free will to choose villainy, while victims have the free will to escape it. No one’s will, really, is violated at all. And even if you try to push the point that the villain’s freedom to succeed is being thwarted (which is not the same thing), in any contest between who, morally, should succeed, a villain or a victim, there is no moral way to argue it’s the villain and not the victim. You would then just be defending villainy. Just like defending God as a slavemaster admits he is evil, so defending God as an aider-and-abetter of villains and thwarter of victims admits he is evil. To then call this evil “good” is simply a semantic trick no one half-awake is going to fall for. You might be able to sustain your own delusion with such irrational moves, but you will only be destroying your religion’s credibility in the eyes of outsiders.
It also will not do any good to complain that there is still “evil” in the Saferoom World (it doesn’t stop theft or disease, for example; and saferoomers still face some inconvenience of relocation that villains can nevertheless exploit; and so on), because the point of this one argument is that a Saferoom World is logically possible yet less evil than our world. That’s enough to prove no good God exists. Everything else is just a quibble over how good a God need be to qualify, which I effectively address in the rest of my Zardoz article. That’s the learning part of this equation. But to start with the persuasion part, it’s enough to force a Christian to stay on this one single point and not evade it by running away, changing the subject, straw manning the example, or any other device. Once this breaks through their delusion (if ever it does), then they will have the motivation to take the time to explore the rest of the equation (and ask, really, honestly, what a world would look like that actually was built by a moral person).
Conclusion
Three points have been made here. One, the strategic difference between persuasion and learning. Two, how to apply this by extending Dillahunty’s single-subject “slavery” argument against the existence of a good God into a single-subject Saferoom argument against the existence of a good God. And three, that once one escapes their delusion and realizes God is implausible, there is much left to learn about how to build a morally just world (rather than foolishly defend as moral the amoral one we live in). But, “Big Picture,” you need to realize that any Argument from Evil against God is, really, a refutation of the Design Argument. There are nonmoral points of bad design that prove our world cannot have been intelligently designed (I outline several in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics and Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed). But the moral points apply to any claim that the designer is good, and thus worthy of respect and allegiance (rather than disgust and disregard).
Since no one believes in malevolent gods anymore, because modern people only believe out of an emotional desire that there be a good God (theism is thus now a delusion, and not, as once it was, a mere epistemic error), refuting the goodness of God is the gateway drug to escaping that delusion and realizing there is no god at all, of any character. And then we can get to the business of admitting the only thing we have is each other, and the world we design and maintain. And then rather than wait around for a non-existent savior and a non-existent immortality in a non-existent paradise, we can get cracking on investing in saving each other, and building our own paradises to live our extended blessed lives in. We might not see that world ourselves. But we could be working to build it for our children, or their children. And that’s better than it never existing at all.
Which you must agree with, if you believe living in a future paradise is a moral good worth helping others to—which all Christians must already believe in…if they are not liars or hypocrites. Although, experience tells us, quite a few are. But the rest can be saved.
-:-
Christians keen on learning why the claims of their mental slavemasters are all lies, such as that abandoning that faith entails abandoning moral goodness and every other real thing of value, will benefit from reading my entire series on Justin Brierley.
Yes! I’m reminded of my experience at the Creed concert in San Antonio where I was under the impression that I had the freedom to use my vape pen, but it turned out that, in the platonic cave of the Frost Bank Center, I didn’t have that freedom, and it was, in fact, the “freedom” of whoever was in charge of “security,” expressed through their staff, not only to eject me from the venue (seems a bit authoritarian, though not quite “unjust”), but also to inject me with ketamine (the drug that killed Elijah McClain) and Ativan (the drug that killed Chris Cornell)! I think I could argue that’s where the injustice occurred! But my little story doesn’t make a big impression on people who view morality as “following rules.” I ran into that view just about every day of the 9 years I lived in Texas! Yikes! You can’t make a rule that an autistic person can’t have a meltdown! THAT’S unjust! Stuff like that results in terrible abuses and injustices against us! But I’m not even seen as a human being if I don’t exude the phenomenon of “respectable behavior,” which, as a phenomenon, is, by definition, not an “essence”! But people are fkn delusional about autism! A lot of them think the meltdown is a form of demonic possession! Even at the behavioral center, where they were supposed to be professionals, they were acting like the meltdowns were an “expression” of my will rather than something that wasn’t coming from my will, but my will was simply “letting happen” because the source is factors beyond my will! It’s actually always related to things other people are doing to me! Like not listening or being bigoted! Ok, so I can’t tolerate bigotry! Bigots see that as a weakness on my part because they’re inside the bigotry delusion! Yikes! I shouldn’t have to exude the phenomenon of respectable behavior around bigots! No one should! That’s one of the reasons why there are still bigots! They’re too comfortable! Our whole society is set up to keep them comfortable!
I’ve never been under the impression that God, in and of Himself, can be “good”. “Good” is a word WE use in describing God, from our perspective. (And, most of us shouldn’t use that word at all to describe God).
Take humans out of the picture entirely, or, better yet, just take the whole of “creation” out of the picture, such that all that’s left is “God” (and yes, I’m talking from the Theistic point of view here), then God Himself can be neither “good” or “evil” (or “moral” or “immoral”). If there were “standards” of, say, “good and evil” that God was subject to, then, He wouldn’t be God at all. Whoever created those standards (presumably) would be.
But, God isn’t subject to anything. Not if He’s God (in the Theistic view). So, He’s not subject to ideas of “good” and “evil” that are somehow “over and above Him”. There is no “over and above” God. God does whatever He does, and simply isn’t subject to judgements of Him being either “good” or “evil”.
Now, the idea that “God is good” is certainly found in the bible. But, what’s being said can only mean “God is good – TO US” – and almost invariably, in the OT in particular, the “US” being referred to is the “chosen people”. But, even there, the statement isn’t a statement of any “necessary characteristic” of God. If it was, then, it could only be that there was a “standard” that God Himself was subject to. But, there’s not.
I’m totally OK with the idea that God told the Jews they could have slaves under certain circumstances. That’s His business with THEM. I’m totally OK with it if God told the Jews to kill all the Amalekites. Again, that’s His business with those “chosen people”. He’s THEIR God, not necessarily a generic, one-size-fits-all God,
Me? I’m not a Jew. God never told me I could have a slave. He didn’t tell me to kill Amalekites. Maybe, in God’s mind, He had some justifiable reason for telling His chosen people to do this-or-that. But, that doesn’t mean I have to do those same things, or that I somehow have God’s permission to do those things. That’s another matter altogether.
Bottom line: I look at the arguments in this post and see “strawmen”. “God is supposed to be ‘good’ by OUR standards” – which is a strawman. “God told the Jews that they could have slaves, and slavery is ‘evil'” – another strawman.
I think I’ll leave off here….
I’ve noted in other articles before how, objectively, anything that actually was like a “God” as theologians describe would sooner be expected to be a cold alien inhuman monster, and not a warm fuzzy friend of men.
So we cannot allow the equivocation fallacy whereby “God is good” means, really, “God is evil.” That’s just semantic dishonesty.
Hence language doesn’t work the way you think. To wit:
This isn’t true, because analytically, “good” can mean whatever we want. Words are just codes for ideas. Humans made them up. They do not cosmically exist in supernatural stone somewhere. Words are just tools for transmitting and computing ideas. Any idea can be plugged into any word. And for effective communication, we need to follow the connections already established by practice.
So, on some definitions of good, any God would be either good or not, independently of whatever that God believed or insisted upon. And insofar as the word “good” only has a useful meaning when we apply the definitions most widely in use and most readily understood, God most definitely cannot be “good” in that sense. And that’s the only sense that matters. Everything else is mere rhetoric.
Case in point, in this article I took the most universally employed definition of the word “evil” as “malevolent/malignant” (and “good” therefore would be “benevolent/benign”; and everything else, neither one or admixtures of the two). God cannot “think” his way out of being malevolent. He either is or he isn’t, independent of what he values or thinks of himself. And this is true even in isolation, as even when people don’t exist, a God can still be modally malevolent (“God will be malevolent to people if or when they exist”).
So, God cannot get out of being evil even by your proposed semantic trickery.
The central thesis of what I wrote previously was “Take humans out of the picture entirely, or, better yet, just take the whole of “creation” out of the picture, such that all that’s left is “God” (and yes, I’m talking from the Theistic point of view here), then God Himself can be neither “good” or “evil” (or “moral” or “immoral”). If there were “standards” of, say, “good and evil” that God was subject to, then, He wouldn’t be God at all. ”
I think maybe you attempted to respond to my central thesis by saying “And this is true even in isolation, as even when people don’t exist, a God can still be modally malevolent (“God will be malevolent to people if or when they exist”).”
No. This is categorically wrong on virtually every level,
All you’re saying is that when people DO come along, they might form opinions about “how God is”.
But God, in isolation, cannot be “modally malevolent” or “modally good”. (And throwing in the word “modally” is as useless as throwing in the word “really”).
If there were only ONE OBJECT in existence, anywhere, then it would be ridiculous to say “that object is tall” or “it’s short”, because there are no comparatives. Certainly, that object itself cannot say of itself “I’m tall” or “I’m short”. If that was the one-and-only object in existence, then descriptives like “tall” and “short” simply do not apply. They’re utterly meaningless.
“Oh, well, that one object could be MODALLY tall”.
As if throwing the word “modally” into it changes anything at all. And it doesn’t.
In the Theistic view, God simply “is”. It’s people, using terms like “modally malevolent” that are attempting to describe God, and this, of course, can only be an attempt made from the perspective of the one making the attempt.
Which is precisely what you’ve done.
But “Take humans out of the picture entirely” does not remove modal facts (what God would be if humans did exist, i.e. if humans encountered him; e.g. Darth Vader remains evil even if he were the only entity in existence) nor does it alter human lexical behavior (the word “good” does not change meaning simply because God changes ontology; the word was invented by humans to refer to phenomena of human concern, so the ontology of God is completely irrelevant here—God remains evil in plain English).
So you can’t get God to not be evil by any of these devices.
Just a reminder that the god of the bible was not “good to” the Jews. Nor is he “good to” anyone else, not by any measure where the word “good” has substantial meaning. So the “God is good – TO US” reference is nonsense.
And sure, a theist COULD say they don’t care what a god does or says. It’s almost certainly not actually true, and just an escape hatch to avoid certain cognitive dissonance. But sure, they can say it. As the article actually lays out though, all it does is prove to everyone else that whatever they believe is almost certainly pointless, evil, incorrect, or some combination of those.
A theist would probably motte and bailey at that point, saying they aren’t trying to prove anything, just pointing out how a certain argument fails against their own (almost certainly fake) characterization of god. And sure, that’s fine. But again, it goes right back to the purpose of this article. The core retreat makes everyone around look less favorably on whatever the theist believes.
Keith is on point here.
Good and evil are the properties of the decisions, behaviors and traits of sapient beings.
If God is sapient, It can be judged by, and understand, those standards.
Fred makes a good point, and to explore why he is right see my analysis in The Objective Value Cascade.
Turning Matt’s last name into a verb is epic!
Dillahunty’s approach is to start with the premise of “slavery is evil,” equivalent in my mind to “I personally find the concept of one human being owning another human being as property to be aesthetically displeasing.” He follows up with an implicit or explicit browbeating of people who won’t agree with that premise straightaway with the equivalent of “you should be ashamed of your morally degenerate aesthetic sense if you don’t feel the same displeasure that I do.”
I agree with the rhetorical effectiveness of this approach and also its applicability to something like counter-apologetics, which is how he uses it. However, I wonder about how it may bleed into an effort to uncover what “morality” actually is, and if “moral facts” can be a thing if discernment between good and evil is predicated upon a subjective emotional feeling of the discerner based in their sense of aesthetics.
I mean, both empathy and psychopathy exist as an aesthetic in all of us, and the weighting between the two can vary a lot between individuals. How much can the psychopath see each aesthetic for what it is, and choose to embrace the one that doesn’t make him feel the way Dillahunty says he “ought” to feel about slavery?
You seem not to have read the article here. I explicitly discuss what you mean.
The thesis of the article is: persuasion must precede learning. Then an example is given of why and how that is.
This is why I note that Dillahunty’s argument operates from internal logic of Christianity. So he is not the one assuming slavery is evil. Christians are. That’s the point of the argument. This is precisely why delusional Christians can try escaping the argument by resorting to abandoning their belief that slavery is evil, the consequences of which I then discuss.
Dillahunty does make a defense of the immorality of slavery (so he does not have to simply assume it). But that’s not pertinent to the argument. Which is my entire point. If you can get Christians to publicly defend slavery as moral, you’ve won in the arena of public opinion. Persuasion successful. Then can follow learning.
The ensuing learning can indeed then lead to sound reasoning about moral facts (like “slavery is immoral”). I wouldn’t expect that from Dillahunty (he is not a professional philosopher; he does “okay” on this). But if you finally, genuinely, want to know what is morally true and why (and not whether fantasies about gods are true or how you can build some rhetoric out of all this to protect those delusions), then you’re in a different conversation.
I link to a few breadcrumbs on that already in this article, but I address slavery specifically in my peer-reviewed chapter on moral facts in The End of Christianity and more broadly in my recent discussion Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America.
The issue is that understanding what moral facts are and which they are and how they are true is complicated (it involves extensive study of psychology, anthropology, game theory, even normative semantics, as well as the end product of almost three thousand years of philosophy), so that entire dive is easy to avoid. The delusional can nitpick their way out of learning any of it or understanding any of it; they can even use its complexity as a reason to reject it (on the fallacy that truth is supposed to be simple). So you can’t gain headway there until they are motivated to care about the truth more than protecting their delusion.
So you have to start with persuasion. And the Dillahunty Method is a good starter kit for that (as is my Saferoom Worlds).
My apologies, I did read the article as well as one of the bread crumbs on what moral facts are, and didn’t finish my thought completely in my question so reading my response it seems it was my mistake and it is understandable that you felt I skipped important points you made.
What I’m getting at is a contention that moral facts are, at a fundamental level, not discerned by dispassionate intellectual methods but rather by the emotionally charged reactions to an aesthetic. That is, the Dillahunty method of persuasion is the method by which we learn morality, and not just a starting point.
Hence the “you ought” in reference to a specific emotional reaction to the very concept of human ownership of another human. I don’t think you can separate the emotion from the learning.
I am not sure what you mean.
Dillahunty gives more reasons than merely “the emotionally charged reactions to an aesthetic” for concluding slavery must be immoral (I don’t find his explanation as clear or logically structured as I would like, but it is certainly more substantive than that).
And Christians who already internally conclude slavery must be immoral are not defending that with “the emotionally charged reactions to an aesthetic” but with a belief that morality comes from God, which is precisely the problem—and why they can try escaping this conundrum by abandoning the belief that slavery is immoral, but with consequences fatal to their mission.
Countless ex-theists will tell you the same story: that they realized something repugnant (like, that they can only keep believing in God if they adopt an immoral belief), which led them to start questioning everything (and within a year or two, they’ve left the faith).
Even if this is explained as solely aesthetic (the religion became repugnant to them) it still ends with a more substantial result (they will pick up secular reasons for moral conclusions, beyond happenstance aesthetics), because that’s how the process of “learning” proceeds.
What I’m getting at is that morality and ethics are fundamentally emotional and subjective. We as a species evolved to be social creatures, and what enables pro-social behavior are the evolution-given emotions that prod us to do so via emotion.
None of us are fully there yet, and some of us are more sociopathic than others (a few are quite so). Emotional persuasion is more than a mere start to learning. It is the mechanism we use to do things like write laws and do awful things to awful people to spark emotions in others to garner the will to do these awful things (deprive awful people of life, liberty, and happiness are some examples) while still recognizing our actions as awful while doing so, and also in the hope that the emotions we spark cause awful people to reconsider their awfulness, or at least to cause them to fear the law more than they want to engage in anti-social behaviors. We like to call it a “necessary evil,” as if the necessity makes it less evil (it doesn’t).
Why do we engage in pro-social activities? Because we are pro-social creatures and our emotions compel us to. I don’t think that we pursue these things because moral facts are objectively true and timeless and we are fundamentally after the truth, whatever it may be. We do so because in this area we are pragmatists. We have (evolving) goals that we desire that drive us, and that desire is emotion.
That we do awful things out of necessity does not make us hypocrites. That we pretend that the awful things we do out of necessity aren’t actually awful does.
I guess what I’m saying is that Dillahunty’s browbeating technique is one of those awful things we must do in the service of pro-social behavior. Taking the next step and whitewashing this awful necessity by washing our hands of emotion and subjectivity is the pretending part.
That’s not really true. They can be rationally derived from objective facts of the world. Which is why moral progress is measurable. It is not the case that our morals are “just as true” or “just as good” as human morals three thousand years ago; we have made measurable improvements over time. That entails an objective metric for what is better, and thus what is best. It is not reductively just “how we feel.” Emotions and subjective realities play a part in, but do not simply fabricate, morality.
But that’s an 801 topic not a 101 topic; and the present article is a 101 intro course, not an advanced graduate course.
If you want to graduate to higher levels of discussion, see The Real Basis of a Moral World and The Objective Value Cascade, and comment or query there appropriately.
However, in respect to what we are supposed to be talking about here—the present article—none of that even matters.
Even if it were the case that all moral judgments were actually purely emotional and subjective and thus arbitrary (and murderous slavemasters are just as “right” or “good” as peaceful human rights advocates), it is still the case that the Christian’s worldview is internally self-contradictory (in precisely the way explained in this article) and it is still the case that god is evil in current English usage and by every current human metric. And in that world (where all moral judgments are purely emotional and subjective and thus arbitrary), there would be no other sense of the word relevant. So even in that world a god could not claim “not” to be evil by any relevant definition. By English usage and subjective perspective, he still is. And there is no semantic workaround for that.
This also is twice now that you have ignored my point that Dillahunty does not use mere “browbeating” here. You keep falsely accusing him of that. I recommend you stop. You’ve been directed to where he makes salient arguments for the immorality of slavery. However much browbeating there is, it does not constitute the whole of his case.
That is irrelevant to my article, since no browbeating is even needed: the logical inconsistency within Christianity exists regardless; and the definition of God as malevolent and thus evil remains correct English usage regardless. But you seem intent on replacing the relevant points of my article with irrelevant falsehoods about Dillahunty’s argumentative methods. So I can’t let that pass.
Fair enough, we seem to be talking past one another, and I think it’s mostly my fault. Thank you for your patience.
I’m more of a pragmatist and engineer than I am a scholar and scientist, if that makes sense. I appreciate your attempts to guide me to the conversation you are attempting to have here.
Okay. Good.
re: ““Take humans out of the picture entirely” does not remove modal facts (what God would be if humans did exist, i.e. if humans encountered him; ”
No, that’s where your wrong. What you’ve done here is to bring in (supposed) “comparables” – ie, God and man. And then, you’re making man the “supreme judge” over “who’s good (or, “malevolent”) and who’s not”.
That’s just starting with the one object that exists, which can neither be called “tall” or “short”, because there’s nothing else to compare it to. Then, you’re adding in another object, and that second object then decides that the first object is “tall” or “short” in comparison to itself.
That would be fine, if the two objects were comparable. But the problem is that the FIRST object is one who’s height cannot be determined at all, perhaps because it’s “existence” is not even in the same relational dimensions as the second object.
So, putting “man” in as a comperable to God is just to introduce an entirely false equivalency (in a sense): the two things are simply NOT comparable; they are as different as an object that has dimensions of height, width, and depth, and one that doesn’t.
You are missing my point. Morality does not come from God. Yet you seem to be starting with that illogical premise.
Morality only derives from human interests (if humans had no interests, there would be no morality; and if humans had different interests, moral facts would differ accordingly; we can expand this to include all “persons,” e.g. aliens and A.I., but it gets the same universal conclusions).
It does not matter what a malevolent monster from outer space “thinks” is moral; it’s still evil to us.
And objective moral facts come from the sum facts of the world, not from individual beliefs or whims.
Thus, in ordinary English, where the word “evil” means, simply “that which is malevolent or malign,” there is no semantic way to get any alien monster from being evil—so long as its actions are malevolent or malign. Because that’s what the word “evil” means.
There’s no way to talk your way out of this with semantics. You cannot change what things are by changing what you call them.
I studied under Alvin Plantinga. Though I disagree with his Free Will Defense, I want to clarify that he is not employing it as a theodicy the way that St. Augustine did. He is using it as a possibility, however remote, to show that Christian faith is not being irrational in believing in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being. He is arguing that it just might be the case that God could not have created a world in which no sin could have occurred. It just might be the case that in every possible world God could have created, human beings would have chosen to do wrong in at least one instance. That being the case, Christian faith in an all-powerful, all-loving God is not a logical contradiction given the free will of human beings. This is not a theodicy for Plantinga; it is merely a demonstration that the Christian is not committing any rational errors. Plantinga concedes that he does not know with any certainty why God allows evil. His free will defense is only a possible explanation for why God might allow it.
Note that that is precisely what fails by my analysis. His defense does not create a logical possibility for the Christian. My analysis therefore keeps even the logical problem of evil still in play. So even his intention to eliminate only that version of the argument also fails.
(Note that I myself do not believe there is a successful logical argument from evil, but not because of Plantinga’s argument, which fails to give us any reason to believe that. For a real reason to believe that, see my analysis in Is a Good God Logically Impossible?)
I haven’t seen this mentioned before, but wouldn’t the free will defense even fail internally in Christianity? Since Christianity already posits a morally perfect world of heaven, if there is free will in heaven, then god had to specifically allow evil in our world, and if there isn’t free will in heaven, then free will is evil.
That is also a problem (and it’s one I point out in Sense and Goodness without God where I give a more complete account of all these problems).
But it is broader than even specifically for the free will defense. Because it is a general fact that heaven cannot exist if this world is the best of all possible worlds. Therefore the Christian is forced onto the horns of a dilemma: reject heaven, or reject a good God.
The way they try to weasel out of this is even more irrational than Plantinga’s Free Will defense, e.g. some nonsense about testing people (omniscient deities don’t need tests, and moral deities have less horrific ways to test people).
This is the whole theodicy problem I tackled last time (see Which Is ‘Rational’: Theism or Atheism?).
Of your books I’ve only read OHJ so I definitely have to read your others, but in general these kinds of problems just reveal an even bigger issue that with any aspect of theology, the more you look into it and its consequences it will always look crazy. With that excuse that free will is just a test for heaven, the world and all of its issues suddenly become pretty meaningless apart from doing what you can to make it into heaven.
To be fair, a theist can say passing a test is not “the only thing” we are doing here (as one might flippantly say, God gives us bennies and lunch breaks while we are taking the test), so life isn’t entirely meaningless (it is, after all, supposed to be an intro course for the next life).
So the real issue is not that, but whether this is what a god would even do. I mean, think about it. You’re God. You could do this. So why are you doing this?
In other words, even as a test, this is a garbage design (the test isn’t in any way fair; what is being tested is shit God built and so really God is just testing himself; and so on), so why would even an unlimited amoral engineer do it this way, much less an unlimited benevolent one? And why bother?
And the point of testing something you made is to fix and improve it. But here, their god isn’t doing that. He is not fixing psychopathy or cancer or neurocognitive biases or even legislation or environmental controls. He’s just moving the machines he likes to another office space with better air conditioning, and junking the others. How does that make sense?
And that’s all before we even get to the outright contradiction that god is omniscient—so he doesn’t need tests. He already knows who is designed well enough to pass, and what design flaws will cause others to fail. But worse, he doesn’t even need to make the faulty machines. He could just make the ones that work.
This is the central problem with the entire Christian worldview: heaven cannot exist if this is the best of all possible worlds (so Christianity is false); and if this is not the best of all possible worlds, we would already be in heaven (as God would never make a poor substitute), yet we’re not, so he can’t exist (and Christianity is false). There is no third option.
This is what convoluted rationalizations like Platinga’s Free Will Defense are supposed to “fix,” but as my article explains, it doesn’t fix anything. It’s just a delusional death-loop engineered to keep a Christian from ruminating further and realizing their entire belief system is false.
Yes they could say we do other things, but since the highest ideal of a Christian the NT promotes is some sort of ascetic, it then seems weird to say that god is so nice that in this world he l gave us the ability to make and enjoy art when you could say these are just vain material pursuits that don’t help you get saved. And then when you add the existence of going to hell it becomes even more glaring that Christian’s believe in a guy who will torture them eternally for not properly listening to him and then they don’t do as he says? Odd. though this is getting far beyond the purpose of a quick and compelling moral argument against god. I’ll say though I have stumped some Christian friends before asking these more internal questions about heaven or asking if the souls of the aborted go to heaven, that’s always a fun one.
These are all valid concerns.
That was great fun to read. I’ve always wondered about christians and their claims that their god can’t stop villians or free will ends. Per their own jesus, the intent is the same as the action, and thus as soon as any villian chooses to do something,and, as you have shown, this god has no limits on what he can interfere with and thus must stop the villian to not be evil.
To be clear, there can be and probably are some limits on what a good God can do to intervene case-by-case. The problem is not that some evils can be justified. The problem is that all evils cannot be justified.
This might be clearer if you read the Zardoz article, where I describe a universe that would be much better than this one, and indeed so ideal as to be preferable to everyone, but it still will have some inconveniences and injustices—just not the horrors of misery and injustice we find in our world.
I have been reading your blog for a while and most of your arguments go over my head. However, In this article you dismiss the Jewish dietary law of no pork as weird. If you look at almost all off the animals considered clean, they are all herbivores. Almost all of the animals considered unclean are carnivores and omnivores (fish are the big exception). Thus pigs are unclean simply because they’re omnivores, not because they’re pigs. This is another example on how important blood is to Judaism and Christianity , but it’s strange how this got transformed into the Eucharist. “You can’t eat animals that consume blood, but you can consume god.
First, even if that were true, that’s precisely a bizarre reason to torture people for the “crime” of eating omnivores. The world does fine eating omnivores. So even just a pragmatic prohibition is weird (in fact stupid, as it restricts access to food, a really dumb thing to do for subsistence economies). But to enforce it by whipping people nearly to death is weirder still.
Second, it isn’t true. The reasons biblically given do not correlate with that one. And that one doesn’t correlate with the result. Rabbits and camels and horses are herbivores, yet banned. Many kosher birds are omnivores, but not banned. Likewise fish, as you note; so why does eating shrimp, clams, or octopus get you forty lashes minus one, but fish are kosher? Why are almost all herbivorous insects banned? Why are all reptiles banned, even the herbivorous turtle?
So your “grand unified theory” of kosher logic isn’t even true. Which makes it even weirder.
The people deciding the dietary law’s weren’t keen observers of nature so exceptions to the general rule are expected. You know this better than I do. I don’t think those people understood what they were doing in a biological sense, but used some sort of rule based on blood. Fish in general were already a major food source so could have either grandfathered in or exempted because the flesh is not bloody. Pigs were a special problem because they were a major food source for other groups, hence were readily available. Finally, it is a complete over exaggeration stating what I suggested is a “grand unified theory”. As much as you complain in general about creating strawmen to argue against, you are doing it here.
I am not saying there are exceptions to a general rule. I am saying your proposed rule clearly does not explain the set at all.
They were not making any decisions about omnivorism. Even that would be weird (it is a bizarre law to outlaw eating omnivores, at all, much less under pain of being savaged). But it’s even weirder that their actual reasoning was far more bizarre.
They were not worried about what mammals and reptiles ate, but only whether they had hooves and chewed cud, the actual reasons stated, which track absolutely nothing sane about food supply. They were not worried about what sea creatures ate, but only whether they had fins and scales, which track absolutely nothing sane about food supply. And no reason is given for the list of prohibited birds; they include all predators, but randomly also include birds that merely lack random features (a crop, an extra finger, and a peelable gizzard), and exclude (making kosher) countless omnivorous birds.
So, no. There was no intelligible logic to their food taboos, other than full-on crazy logic. Hence, weird and bizarre.
And it is not logical to try and restore a falsified theory by making up a bunch of “just so” stories to get it to fit again. Your just so stories also don’t make sense. Fish bleed (conspicuously). So do cetaceans, yet they are banned. Shellfish also bleed, though (like the octopus) it tends to not be red. But locusts don’t have red blood either, yet are kosher. So, no, that theory doesn’t work either.
Earle: It’s well-accepted by most anthropologists that the taboo rituals of the kosher eating, like most taboo rituals, are precisely chosen because they don’t have a rational basis. There may have been some implicit empirical ideas at play originally in some of the choices, though pork taboo was inherited from the Egyptians and the pork taboo probably emerged because pigs in dry areas have to wallow and so seem unclean even though they’re actually very clean animals, but the whole point is that the taboo should be arbitrary and weird.
Because that’s how it signals group cohesion and loyalty.
When you see that you go to someone’s house and they don’t mix milk and meat, or drain the animal, or whatever, you see that they’re part of the group. It can quietly signal group membership.
That’s why these rituals were associated with joining the group . There’s no indication anywhere that “Oh, we should try to get gentiles to not eat pork because it’s bad for them”. It’s a ritual group standard.
Something came to my mind when listening to Bart Ehrman talk with Alex O’Connor about the Dark Side of Christmas. They were reflecting on the story in Matthew (2:13-23) of Herod butchering hundreds (thousands?) of babies to get rid of the up-and-coming “King of the Jews” and how that led to them escaping to Egypt. That section cites two “prophecies” from Jeremiah (Rachel weeping) and Hosea (“out of Egypt I called my son”) — arguably as an excuse — a need — for the suffering. That is, the suffering was not needless, it was needed for a purpose: that prophecy may be fulfilled.
Have you come across any of them using a fourth technique, where they attempt to show the necessity of the suffering associated with slavery, thus negating the “needless” part of the “needless suffering” charge? I can imagine them trying, and failing, for the same reasons that “so that prophecy may be fulfilled” falls flat on a modern audience as a “need” for babies being slaughtered and their mothers crying like Rachel.
We modern audiences are, however, open to hearing arguments from necessity. They were (and still are) effectively used to justify the second world war, for example. (Note I’m focusing on persuasion here and not the next step of diligent truth-seeking, so hopefully I’m back on track to engage your main topic.)
The irony of the first word in that quote from you is not lost on me, but have you given any thought to the suffering you are intentionally causing with this emotionally satisfying (for you, and Dillahunty, and I’ll admit myself as well) “mic drop” technique? Can you defend the necessity of this pain? Your opening paragraph seems to try, however I’m not sure you’ve exhausted all of the alternatives to this technique and analyzed them with the intent of finding the best possible technique available to us.
When I found myself nodding my head in agreement with the efficacy of this technique, I caught myself reveling in the emotional satisfaction on the part of the mic-dropper and tried to consider what it felt like to have this kind of mic dropped on me. The people who suffer from this, admittedly, are not the target of the technique. Rather, it is the people who the suffering-from-mic-dropping-evangelists wish to convert that are able to see better the moral bankruptcy of the sales pitch combined with the shift in strategies of the suffering from conversion of others and adding to their flock to not losing even m?ore people (including themselves) to this strategy. Do these evangelists “deserve” the suffering we just inflicted on them? Are we now using suffering as retribution for their “sins” of being “irrational and often delusional?”
What might “mercy” look like to the mic-dropper?
I think, when you boil it down, the Bible is simply a form of othering. Its hypocrisy concerning slavery illustrates this entirely. The overarching theme of the OT is “We were slaves in Egypt and the Lord freed us”. (i.e. slavery is a bad thing FOR US). Otherwise, not so much. It’s kind of ridiculous, really.
A huge part of a lot of religion is precisely that out-group/in-group dynamic being given some kind of ideological framework. (To be fair, religion can also be a mechanism for people to overcome that dynamic, but usually still within a greater out-group rather than a true universalism). So many gods were gods of cities, or nations, or that were associated with a group within their own mythology, to say nothing of the association of gods and kings.
And it’s precisely the arbitrariness of it that is the utility. God chose us to be freed, therefore that’s good. Other people who were enslaved are still enslaved because they are bad. Never mind that we were enslaved at one point so apparently God couldn’t stop that (in which case maybe the gods of those slave people are for the moment similarly powerless rather than not blessing them?) This is why the Euthyphro dilemma is actually really important to be said out loud even though it seems kind of trivial once you say it. The god’s opinion is just the opinion of an authority no better than a king. But it’s easy to grant the god moral authority just by default by naked authoritarianism.
The interesting question is, how much of this is chosen by people by motivated reasoning (i.e. they’re already doing the thing so they need justification) versus how much of it is then thus caused by the religion (i.e. people actually convinced by the idea that the god approves to ignore what their ordinary human empathy would otherwise make them perceive).
Hi marley1312, you said: “If there were “standards” of, say, “good and evil” that God was subject to, then, He wouldn’t be God at all.”
I wonder whether you think there are logical truths (e.g. Modus Ponens) or mathematical truths (e.g. 1 + 1 = 2 in the base 10 number system) that God also isn’t subject to? So he could make 1 + 1 = 3.1412 base 10??
If not and he is subject to those “laws”, maybe he could be subject to moral law without diminishing him? What do you think?
(Just a footnote here: God cannot be immune to logic. To say something is illogical is semantically identical to saying it does not exist.)
Hi Richard, I wonder if a Christian believed, as CS Lewis apparently did, that the OT wasn’t a direct revelation of God’s standards, but a slowly dawning journey of discovery by the Israelites, whether that negates much of your argument? What do you think?
You’d have to build out the theory more to evaluate it. As stated, you sound like you are saying “What if the OT is just a bunch of bad human philosophy couched in god-language?” If that is what you mean, you are obviously correct.
But if you mean something else, like somehow God himself is confused or malformed in his ideas and he himself had to tinker with people over time to figure out what was moral, that contradicts (and thus eliminates) Platinga’s God (and all other gods are eliminated by other consequence arguments than that).
Wouldn’t this position fail though just by reading the NT where “Jesus” and Paul and others explicitly say that the OT is revealed scripture?
It’s getting silly at this point, but to play Devil’s Advocate:
If the theory is that the OT exhibits just bad human philosophy, then yes, this would contradict the NT. But since Christians routinely believe contradictory things, I don’t see how adding one more contradictory belief would have any effect on their faith.
But if the theory is that the OT exhibits a malformed learning god, then no, this would not contradict the NT, since, insofar as to get the OT theory even to work one has to stretch symbolical discourse rules to allow any seemingly falsifying statement to be reinterpreted as in some symbolical way referencing the theory, one would then simply apply the same hermeneutical and exegetical principles to any purportedly falsifying statements in the NT.
In other words, once a Christian is committed to a ridiculous exegetical procedure, they can apply it as easily to the NT as the OT, thus avoiding what you might mean here by “failure” (though not avoiding what you and I usually mean by failure, on which definition, all modern Christianity is already a failure, logically and empirically, which is why adding yet more failure modes won’t impact belief—they are already immune to falsifications; that’s why they still believe in such an illogical worldview in the first place).
But, I must add, this has all been speculating angels on the head of a pin.
In practical reality, no Christians will ever adopt the theory Erich proposed; and even if any did, it would fail to succeed in any relevant way (the idea would fade into fringe irrelevance at best).
This is because Christianity is not believed on any basis of rationality. Christians start, epistemically, with an emotional need to believe certain things—not just that a god exists, but that that god is an infallible and all-powerful authority. Everything else is just an elaborate matrix for defending that motivated belief.
This is why process theology (the closest thing in reality to what Erich has in mind) failed. It has taken no sect by storm and is now pretty much just an obscure footnote in history.
Is being cognisant of a metric/standard necessary to say x is good/ y is bad?
Matt Dillahunty often gets rather workt up when speaking of human trafficking in the bible – ‘that is effing evil’ etc.
Yet he admits the basis for his morality is subjective opinion to start with (though not the objective actions that get us to the subjective ‘human flourishing’ morality basis)
I’m sorry, I don’t understand your questions.
In English the word “good” means benevolent and beneficent, not malicious or malevolent. That’s the metric. One does need to be aware of a metric to apply it. But pretty much every sane human adult is cognizant of this metric. So what do you mean?
This is a kind of affective fallacy, confusing a speaker’s emotions with their arguments. It does not matter whether someone gets emotional about what they are saying. What matters is the content of their arguments.
This sentence is not intelligible. But I think (?) you mean to say that Dillahunty says morality is just “subjective opinion” (he does not; you are confusing the words “subjective” and “opinion”; to school yourself up, see Objective Moral Facts) and that Dillahunty said there is no objective fact as to which behaviors maximize human flourishing (he did not; he said exactly the opposite: to school yourself up on his metaethics, see Morality as Well-Being).
Perhaps you are having difficulty expressing something else, such as the notion that Dillahunty’s subjectivist moral theory is in some way inadequate to ground morality. When posed this he generally focuses on comparative metaethics (that theism is also subjectivism and thus does not solve this grounding problem, either, and he is correct about that: see The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory), which (along with his appeal to universal human sentiment, a la Hume) dismisses the inadequacy objection.
So perhaps you mean, not that he doesn’t ground morality, but that his ground does not adequately justify his morality (i.e. it lacks adequate motivation for people to adopt that ground and thus his morals). This he sort of answers to Jordan Peterson, which is simply that one can choose to be evil or good, but you must logically necessarily face the social judgments that that entails (rather than try to hide from them by pretending evil is good), i.e. you will be correctly labeled evil and treated accordingly (conversely, he is a Humean about tendency: most humans innately prefer being good, so it’s not a 50/50 proposition, since most people are coming to the table already with a committed empathy they cannot get rid off and don’t want to).
I do not agree with him (I think there is a better way to justify and ground morality). But he is at least making these points, so you cannot claim he isn’t. He is also bad at this. I do not consider his handling of metaethics to be very well constructed or clear and he is bad at understanding what a critic is asking him; because he is not a professional philosopher. But that’s not the same thing as saying he doesn’t have answers to these questions; he’s just not great at explaining them.
There are times when Dillahunty veers toward social contract theory (there are consequences to adopting the wrong ground that reverberate poorly back on you) but he seems unaware of the concept and doesn’t articulate it well; and there are times he seems almost deontological regarding one’s self-opinion, but never clearly elaborates this, either, i.e. his arguments can be reduced to a clearer expression he himself never uses: if you are evil but tell yourself you are good, that is an objectively false assessment of yourself.
People tend to confuse that with genuinely agreeing you are evil. So Dillahunty has a point here: why does almost no one take that position even when it is true? His answer is: because people don’t want to be evil; they want to believe they are good, and so if they are evil, they will try lying to themselves about that, rather than simply conceding it and being content with who that then entails they are. Yet that is objectively lying to themselves.
This is Dillahunty’s theory in a nutshell, IMO. Even in its social contract theory incarnation, as that reduces to the same matrix of false beliefs about what is best even in that context: people tell themselves that their moral system satisfies a good social contract (and by their own definition of good) when, objectively, it does not (even by their own definition of good), which gets back to false beliefs, this time about things outside themselves.
In other words, almost no one argues “it is better to be evil by common human definition,” and for a reason: humans generally are good (genetically and by enculturation), and so morality is just the mechanics of working out how to behave once you have decided to be good.
Professional philosophers can build this out better. But if that’s what you want, start at Real Moral World, then to ground in Objective Value Cascade, and back to application in Some Things to Consider. And to orient you within the gamut of professional positions on this generally, see Open Letter.