(Author’s note: This continues a series answering objections to the Christian worldview. A while back I made a call for folks to send me their “best shot.” For the other posts in the series, simply follow the links and the pingbacks in the comments section.)
For those of you who are wondering, I haven’t stopped the “Skeptics Answered” series…I’ve just been writing about other things. I plan on at least doing another five posts in the series, maybe more. I’m A.D.D like that; I’ll become interested in one thing, only to…hey look, a butterfly!!!
Some time ago, I wrote a post giving a brief sketch of some evidence for God’s existence. One argument I gave was the moral argument. That argument turns on the existence of objective moral values. There were some responses to that argument that displayed a lack of understanding as to what, exactly, “objective” means, so I thought a basic “metaethics 101″ post would be a good idea. I’m going to post this as a series over the next few days, since it will be quite lengthy.
The three premises of the argument are:
1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3) Therefore, God exists.
Some responses to the argument were (these are exact quotes from the comments section):
1: Fails. It assumes that without a God there is no objective morality, whereas it ignores the idea that morality can arise naturally as a group survival mechanism. There is a definite evolutionary edge to being able to live and operate in groups without worrying about your neighbour killing you.
2: Fails. Morality is not actually objective, some elements of morality are more basic than others, but morality itself is subjective. Killing somebody is wrong, but killing somebody to defend somebody else or yourself, can be heroic.
The only central element to morality that can make it seem objective is compassion, which has been observed in other social animals. You can have all the moral rules you like – but if you don’t have compassion you end up with places like Saudi Arabia.
The concept of “Without God no objective morality” fails to account for the fact that believing in God is not a pre-requisite for morality – objective or otherwise. The evidential argument goes against it, in the form of highly moral atheists, and the behaviour of human beings throughout history.
Like I mentioned above, these comments display a misunderstanding of what being an “objective moral value” entails.
Metaetics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the meaning of certain moral terms like ought, duty, right, wrong, worth, etc. There are nonmoral ways to define such terms (for example, there is a sense of “ought” that is solely rational, as in “given a certain amount of evidence Y, you should believe X.”), but metaethics attends to the normative, moral meanings of those terms.
Pretty much all metaethical views fall into two rough categories: noncognitivist and cognitivist.
The former holds that moral statements are neither true nor false. If I said, “the television is my living room is square,” I’m asserting something with ontological consequences, that there is an actual something in the real world (my living room) with the property squareness. I’m stating there is some actual state of affairs in the world. Therefore, that statement can be either true or false.
Noncognitivist theories deny this about moral statements. One major noncog. theory is emotivism. Emotivists hold that the meaning of a moral statement is a mere expression of emotion. When I, for example, say “Bush was wrong for doing X,” all this really means is “Bush, ugh!” or “booooo, Bush!”
Imperativalists agree that moral statements aren’t statements of fact, but disagree with emotivists that they are mere expressions of emotion, holding that moral statements are statements of command that guide action, akin to “Do X!”
To make a long story short, noncog. theories miss crucial features of morality (this is basically the case with all metaethical theories except the last one I’ll touch on in a few days). Moral judgments can be made apart from emotions or commands. I can believe and say “feeding a cockroach caviar is wrong” while not feeling or commanding much of anything. This shows that the reduction offered by noncogs isn’t valid, for if it is, then it would be impossible to have the former without the latter. Feelings can come along with moral statements, but they aren’t the whole ball of wax.
Secondly, noncog. theories make it awfully difficult to disagree morally. How could you disagree with an emotion? Disagreement requires some fact or state of affairs to disagree on, but according to the noncognitivist, neither exists in the area of morality.
So, “booo, noncognitivism!”
**to be continued tomorrow!
BTW, I’m making liberal use of Craig and Moreland’s *Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview* in writing these posts. Excellent resource.
