Skeptics Answered: Metaethics 101 part III

See part I here and part II here.

Let’s now consider some of the replies I quoted in part I:

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.

You can see that the evolutionary view touted here is an ethical naturalistic view, and hence is not fully objective.  There are many problems with this naturalistic view (go here ID: pugnacious.  password: irishman), one of them being that it eliminates a key feature of morality: it’s prescriptive, obligatory nature.  All the skeptic can do here is describe how we came to behave in certain ways that we call “moral.”   This, however, isn’t morality: it’s just describing behavior.  The skeptic can also describe the evolutionary advantage that such actions supposedly contain.  But if one says that we can derive obligations from this, he has committed the is/ought fallacy.  Lastly, the evolutionary reduction fails because there are many counter examples such that the act conveys an evolutionary advantage yet is still wrong, and vice versa.  Along these lines, some evolutionary psychologists have written evolutionary accounts of rape, for example (also here).

The act isn’t irreducibly wrong, these folks suggest; the guy’s just, well, obeying the DNA.

Another reply:

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.

You can see here that the person confuses absolute with objective and he also misunderstands the nature of “subjective.”   What he’s doing here is describing two different actions in two different situations, both of which have objective moral properties.  The first action (which I take to be killing an innocent person…he really doesn’t describe, so I’m just assuming) has one irreducible moral property, while the second action is a totally different action with a different property ascribed to it.

For this to be subjective, he’d have to say that the same action, say, killing an innocent person not in self defense, would be right for person A, but wrong for person B because the moral statement would be about the speakers and their psychological states, not the action itself.

In other words, when the skeptic says, “Killing somebody is wrong, but killing somebody to defend somebody else or yourself, can be heroic,” I ask, “what is that statement about?”  If the skeptic replies, “it’s about my tastes and beliefs,” then he is saying morality is subjective, but if he replies, “I’m saying something about both killing innocents and killing in self defense,” then he is no longer saying morality is subjective.  Again, some (not all) actions can be right with one set of circumstances and wrong in another set of circumstances and still be fully objectively right or wrong.

Some reply (like one in the “no evidence” post did) by citing people that disagree and asking “who is right?”  According to subjectivism, neither is wrong; they are all right, because they are both making statements about themselves! Only in objectivism can there be legitimate moral disagreement.  The mere fact of disagreement between moral observers does not entail subjectivism…quite the contrary.

I don’t think the skeptic is prepared to make the case for subjective morality, though, mostly because it would get him into some pretty sticky situations (see relevant link from part II).  It’s a pretty tough bullet to bite.

One last comment:

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.

I actually tackled this in depth in the second part of the “no evidence for God?” post.  This response demonstrates a misunderstanding between metaphysics and epistemology.  Epistemologically speaking, of course the atheist can act moral and believe morality is objective.  The argument doesn’t deny that.  Rather, the argument deals with metaphysics–what, at bottom, is morality?  If there is no God, no one, not even the Christian, does objectively moral things, because objective morality is, at bottom, an illusion!  We might think we’re being objectively moral, but we’re not…we’re just obeying the herd instinct or are blathering on about personal tastes and cultural conventions akin to eating salad with a fork.

Again, atheists can hold to objective morality without belief in God.  That is not the issue.  The issues are: a) can the atheist ground and justify his objective morality without borrowing capital from a theistic worldview? and b) is anything moral afterall?

The skeptic might reply, like one did:

What you are claiming is that even if morality isn’t an indicator for belief – your religion is the source of all morality anyway.

This response turns on a very ambiguous notion of what “religion” and “source” mean.  If the skeptic means by “religion” the Bible, or the Christian creeds, and by “source” the notion that one cannot know/believe X is wrong without knowing/believing the Bible or the creeds, then it is false that I’m claiming the source of all morality is religion.  If, however, the skeptic means by “religion” the Christian worldview, and “source” the notion that morality is metaphysically grounded in the Christian worldview, that’s another  matter alltogether.

Theists maintain that objective morality is rooted in the being of God.  God was around before the Bible and before the creeds.  This argument has been valid even before a stroke of the Bible was written or before any philosopher pontificated on it.  As long as God and human beings have existed, it has been wrong to murder.  The fact that it has been discovered by philosophers or elaborated on in the Scriptures does not mean one must have read Copan or believe in the Bible to hold to objective morality.  People believe all sorts of things that are not grounded in their worldview.  People are inconsistent all the time.  That doesn’t mean they should keep doing that, but it happens.