Jason Thibodeau
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Cypress College, Cypress, CA
Thaddeus Metz
Professor, Department of Philosophy
University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Bruce Russell
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Wayne State University, MI
David Neil
Lecturer in Philosophy
University of Wollongong, Australia
The aim of this chapter is not to consider particular ethical questions; it is to ask whether there are general facts about morality and our ability to make moral judgments that count in favor of either theism or atheism.
Jason Thibodeau, Cypress College
MORAL REASONS WITHOUT GODA young child is suffering from malnutrition caused by a severe famine, itself caused by political conflict in her home country. Her suffering is extremely severe, as is that of her parents, who, in addition to their own physical suffering, are also suffering emotionally because of their reasonable fears that their daughter will die. A group of kind people who work for a humanitarian organization locate the family and bring them the water, food, and medical supplies needed to nurse them back to health. The group also provides them with transportation to a refugee camp in a neighboring country and help the family emigrate out of the conflict zone.
Arbitrariness Problem
Contingency Problem
Divine Command Theory of Moral Obligation
Euthyphro Problem
Metaethical Divine Command Theory (MDCT)
Normative Divine Command Theory (NDCT)
Problem of Counterintuitive Possibilities
Supervenience
We can make the following moral claims about this scenario: The child's suffering and that of her parents is bad. It is good that the child's suffering has been relieved. It is good that her parents' anguish has been relieved. The aid workers who helped the family acted with virtue. They had strong reasons to provide such assistance. Those responsible for the conflict ought to do everything they can to end the conflict. People who are in a position to help ought to provide other famine victims with lifesaving assistance.
Consider now the claim that moral facts depend for their existence on the existence of God. Is this claim true? The first paragraph of this section lists only natural facts about the child, her family, and their predicament. The second paragraph lists moral facts about them. It is possible that God does not exist but that all the natural facts in the first paragraph are true. If moral facts depend on the existence of God, then, if God does not exist, the natural facts listed in the first paragraph are true but the moral facts in the second paragraph are false. An atheist moral realist will find this claim to be implausible. For such an atheist, the natural facts in the first paragraph are sufficient to make the moral facts in the second paragraph true.
All moral realists agree that the moral facts are dependent on the natural facts in the following sense: if there are changes in the moral facts, there must be corresponding changes in the natural facts. If the child's situation is morally better, then her suffering must have been relieved. If there is no longer an obligation to render aid, then the natural facts must have changed—for example, the family is no longer suffering from malnutrition. Furthermore, the right kind of changes in the natural facts will result in changes to the moral facts. If the child is not suffering from malnutrition, then her situation is better. Philosophers call this kind of dependence relation supervenience. An atheist moral realist will say that this supervenience can be explained on the premise that the natural facts are sufficient to make the moral facts true.
It is natural to ask such an atheist moral realist such questions as, “Why does the suffering of the child make her situation bad? In virtue of what is the child's suffering bad?” The best response to such a question is, I believe, to say that suffering is a kind of mental state whose nature gives us reasons to avoid it (see Parfit 2011). That is what it is for something to be morally bad. We might also want to ask, “In virtue of what do governments have a moral obligation to work to end armed conflicts?” An atheist could respond by saying that the fact that armed conflict causes great suffering is a moral reason to work to avoid them.
Many people are unsatisfied by the kind of answers I just provided. To such people it is implausible that a natural fact could be sufficient to make it the case that any moral claim is true. To some of them, only the existence of God could account for moral facts. Let's consider this. Suppose that we think that God does something in virtue of which the moral facts hold. We can ask, “Why is it that what God does makes it the case that, for example, the child's suffering is bad?” I do not think that there is a response to this question that is any more satisfying than the response that I gave above to the question, “Why does the suffering of the child make her situation bad?” These questions are exactly parallel, and, for someone who is inclined to be skeptical about moral facts, there is probably no answer that will satisfy. The fact that the atheist cannot answer such questions in a manner that satisfies the moral skeptic is no more reason to doubt the truth of atheistic moral realism than the fact that the theist cannot satisfy the skeptic is a reason to doubt the truth of theistic moral realism.
The atheist moral realist will believe the following two claims: First, that certain natural facts, such as those stated in the first paragraph of this section, are sufficient to give us moral reasons.
Second, that there is nothing God could do, which would add to the natural facts, in virtue of which and only in virtue of which we would have moral reasons. Some philosophers have argued that moral properties are metaphysically and epistemically peculiar (see Mackie 1977, and Parfit 2011, esp. 464–510, for a response to such arguments); others have argued that, because of such peculiarity, the existence of moral properties is evidence that favors theism over atheism (see Craig 2007). To show that moral realism does not give us reason to accept theism, we do not have to establish the first of the above two claims; we need only show that the second is true. In this section, I show that the attempt to ground moral facts in some activity, attitude, or judgment of God inevitably fails because no activity of God could account for the existence of moral reasons. We can see this with the help of a proper understanding of the Euthyphro problem.
Does God command morally right actions because they are right, or are they right because God commands them? Divine command theories of moral obligation are committed to the second option. According to metaethical divine command theory (MDCT), a morally right action is right in virtue of the fact that God commands that we do it, and a morally wrong action is wrong in virtue of the fact that God commands that we not do it. But this view seems to have the following problematic consequences:
What is sometimes referred to as the Euthyphro problem (so called because it was first raised in Plato's Euthyphro [c. 380 BCE], a dialogue on the nature of piety) is actually three problems: (1) the arbitrariness problem, (2) the contingency problem, and (3) the problem of counterintuitive possibilities. Since the late 1970s and early 1980s there has developed a standard response to the Euthyphro problem (see, e.g., Wierenga 1983; Adams 1979; Milliken 2009), which I will call the appeal to love (ATL). ATL reminds us that God is essentially omnibenevolent and that his commands are constrained by his nature. It is not consistent with the character of an omnibenevolent being to issue horrible commands. Furthermore, his character is the same in every possible world. Since his commands are grounded in and constrained by his character, he will issue the same (or at least very nearly the same) set of commands in every possible world. Most important, there is no possible world in which God commands something horrible or commands that we not do something kind. It seems, therefore, that ATL eliminates the most problematic of the above consequences. God's commands are grounded in his essential nature; thus, he will not issue horrible commands, nor are there possible worlds in which the content of morality differs dramatically from the actual world.
Whether this response adequately addresses all three of the above problems is not my concern here (see Thibodeau 2017 for a discussion of this question). Since we are interested in normativity and reasons, I am going to focus exclusively on the arbitrariness problem and show that ATL does not resolve the problem.
ARBITRARINESS AND WHY IT IS A PROBLEMThe reason that arbitrariness is a problem is that it shows that MDCT undermines the connection between moral facts and reasons. If God has no reason to command that we A, then there is no reason why A is obligatory rather than wrong. A just happens to be morally right because God just happened to command it; nothing more can be said about why A is right. So, if I ask, “Why should I A?” the only answer possible is, “Because God commanded that you A.” But if God had no reason to command that I A, then how can I have a reason to A? If God's commands are not grounded in normative reasons, then, in a fundamental sense, there is no normative reason for me to do what he commands.
In this context, it is important to bear in mind the difference between metaethical divine command theory—or, as I have been calling it, MDCT—and normative divine command theory (see Murphy 2002, 6–7, for a thorough discussion of this distinction). MDCT claims that all moral obligations are grounded in God's commands. The normative divine command theory (NDCT) claims that if God commands that we A, we are obligated to A, but only because of the existence of a supreme ethical principle according to which God's commands are to be obeyed. NDCT does not account for the source of this principle, but for the theory to work, it must be external to and independent of God and his commands. Since MDCT is meant to be an account of all moral obligations, it is not consistent with NDCT. In other words, if NDCT is true, then MDCT is false because there is at least one moral obligation that is independent of God's commands, namely the obligation to obey God.
Let's connect this to reasons. NDCT's supreme principle amounts to the claim that we always have reason to obey God. Thus, on NDCT, the reason-giving force of a divine command is rooted in that supreme principle. Since the existence of such an independent principle is not consistent with MDCT, MDCT cannot appeal to it to account for the reason-giving force of divine commands. That force, on MDCT, must be internal to the commands themselves. But arbitrary commands have no reason-giving force.
Does MDCT, modified by ATL, imply that God has reasons for his commands? The answer depends on what we mean by reason. In one sense, offering a person's reasons is offering an account of the motives on which the person acted. In this sense a reason is part of an explanation of an intentional action: offering a reason means appealing to the factor(s) on the basis of which the agent acted. In a different sense, however, when we appeal to reasons we are not trying to provide an explanation of the person's actions but rather account for how, whether, and/or to what extent the action is justified. To avoid this ambiguity, philosophers typically speak of motivational reasons (or simply motives) when talking about factors on the basis of which the agent acts, and normative reasons (or simply reasons) when talking about factors that tend to justify actions.
The arbitrariness problem should not be understood as the concern that, on MDCT, God's commands would be unmotivated. Rather, the problem is that they would not be grounded in normative reasons. To see this, consider the possibility that there exists a deity that is very much like the God of the monotheistic faiths, except that, whereas God is perfectly benevolent, this other deity, whom we will call Asura, is perfectly malevolent. Asura is motivated by hatred and his commands flow from his hateful nature; he commands horrible things, including that we engage in the torture of children. Of course, Asura's commands are not unmotivated: he commands that we torture because he is filled with hatred. But his commands are nonetheless arbitrary in the sense that they stem merely from his own personal motives; they are not grounded in normative reasons. The affective character of Asura's motivational profile, by itself, does not provide reasons for his commands. The same is true, by parity of reasoning, of God. Of course, it is true that the motives that a loving being acts on will, unlike Asura's motives, frequently also be normative reasons. But this is not the same as the claim that having a loving nature gives one normative reasons. This argument shows that for God to have normative reasons for his commands, those reasons must be grounded in factors that are external to God's motivational profile.
A normative reason is a factor that counts in favor of an action (see Dancy 2006). (It is worth noting that, by counting in favor of an action, a consideration tends to justify the action. However, it would be wrong to think that the mere presence of a factor that favors some action justifies that action. In many cases there will be factors that favor engaging in some action and other factors that favor not engaging in that action or favor some alternative action.) This is not the place to offer a complete account of what reasons are and what they do. One point, though, is important for the present discussion. For a factor to favor one person's action, it must be the case that any other person, who is in relevantly similar circumstances, would be equally justified to act on its basis. Let's call this the universal character of reasons. This universal character has an important implication for any discussion of God's reasons. If there are factors that count in favor of God's commanding that humans engage in some action, the universal character of reasons implies that these same factors count in favor of our engaging in the action God has commanded that we engage in. If so, they would count in favor of our so acting even if God had not commanded the action.
So, if there are normative reasons for God's commands, there must be factors that count in favor of God's commands, and these factors must be external to God's motivational profile. It seems fair to suggest that a factor that counts in favor of a divine command can only be some feature of the action that is the object of the command. In other words, if God has a normative reason to command, for example, that we help the poor, there must be some fact (or facts) about helping the poor that counts in favor of God's commanding that we do it. Similarly, there must be some fact about, for example, killing that counts in favor of God's commanding that we not kill.
This is perhaps what defenders of MDCT who appeal to God's love have in mind. Given that God is loving, he will command that we do good things and not do bad things. It is the goodness or badness of an action that provides God with normative reasons (see Milliken 2009 for a defense of precisely this view). But if that is the correct analysis, then it is equivalent to the view that the goodness of, for example, the act of telling the truth gives God reasons to command that we tell the truth. And the badness of killing provides God with reasons to command that we not kill. The problem for MDCT is that, even in the absence of God's commands, these actions still have these features. And if these features provide God with reasons to command, then, given the universal character of reasons, they provide us with reasons to do what God commands. Since these factors are independent of God's commands, they would be reasons even if God issued no commands. In other words, these factors, which count in favor of God's commands, would count in favor of our engaging in the actions God commands that we engage in (and refrain from engaging in the actions that God commands that we not engage in) even if God does not exist.
If God has reasons for his commands, then it is these reasons, rather than God's commands, that are moral reasons for us. If God does not have reasons for his commands, then his commands are arbitrary. MDCT claims that an action is morally wrong just in virtue of the fact that God commands that we not do it. Given the nature of reasons and the universality of reasons, this can only mean that, on MDCT, God does not have reasons for his commands. But, given the connection between morality and reasons, arbitrary commands cannot ground moral obligations.
THE IRRELEVANCE OF GODGiven all of this, we can now say, with some confidence, that the existence of God is almost certainly irrelevant to the existence of moral facts and properties. If God exists, then God has beliefs and desires about, attitudes toward, and judgments concerning the moral value of human actions. Since morality is normative, true moral judgments and beliefs, as well as appropriate moral attitudes and desires, are not arbitrary. Thus God's judgments, attitudes, and so on must be grounded in reasons. Whatever reasons God has that ground his moral judgments, attitudes, and so on will, because of the universal character of reasons, also be reasons for us. If God does not exist, those reasons still exist.
Consider an act of deliberately torturing and killing a small child. Now abstract away any and all facts that have to do with God, including God's attitudes toward and judgments about those facts. The natural properties that will not be abstracted away include the fact that it is an act of deliberate cruelty, that the child suffers severe physical and emotional pain, and that the people who love this child also suffer intensely. An atheist moral realist will think that these natural facts are sufficient to give us overriding reasons to not engage in such actions. True, if God exists and is loving, then these factors will motivate him to command that we not torture children, and these same factors will count in favor of (i.e., be reasons for) his command. But, even if God does not exist, these same factors still exist. If they are reasons for God to command that we not torture, then, given the universal character of reasons, they are reasons for us to not torture. The reason-giving force of these factors exists completely independently of any divine command.
On any view according to which the existence of God is necessary for the existence of moral properties, the natural properties of an act of torturing a child are not sufficient to make it the case that there are moral reasons to refrain from such actions. This claim is highly implausible. If the fact that an act deliberately causes the undue, unnecessary suffering and death of an innocent child does not give us moral reasons, then it is not clear what the existence of God could do to change this. The challenge for any defender of the claim that God is necessary for the existence of objective moral properties is to explain (a) why natural properties, such as the fact that an act involves the deliberate causing of intense physical and emotional suffering, are not sufficient to ground moral reasons, and (b) what God could do in virtue of which the action, which in the absence of such divine activity lacks all moral properties, would be morally wrong. In the absence of good explanations, it is more plausible to suppose that the natural features of actions are sufficient to ground their moral properties.
Thaddeus Metz, University of Johannesburg
This section addresses one specific facet of the debate between theists and atheists with respect to morality. Both philosophers who believe in God and those who do not sometimes argue in support of their views by contending that they do a better job than their rivals of accounting for certain features of our moral lives. For instance, the previous section supposes, for the sake of argument, that there are moral facts and considers whether theism or atheism best explains them. The present section considers whether theism or atheism best explains relatively uncontroversial features of people's moral beliefs.
Think for a moment about the differences between moral facts and moral beliefs. Beliefs are features of human psychology. They are states of mind, specifically, ones that are capable of being true or false. While beliefs can be appraised as either true or false, other mental states, such as feelings, desires, and moods, cannot. It does not make any sense to ascribe truth or falsity to, say, the feeling of pleasure, the desire for an apple, or an irritable mood (although one can sometimes appraise them as appropriate or not). In contrast, beliefs are what can represent the world accurately or inaccurately; they are judgments.
Whereas beliefs are features of the mind, facts are features of the world. A fact is a state of affairs at a certain time; it is a way that some part of the world is or has been (or, perhaps, will be). Uncontested examples of facts include: nothing can be green all over and red all over at the same time; it has not rained much in Cape Town this year; it is proper to drive on the right side of the road in the United States; I like chocolate. Some facts are necessary, that is, could not be otherwise, as in the first example, while others are contingent, as in the latter three. Some facts are absolute, in the sense of not depending on humans for their reality, as per the first two examples, while others are relative, that is, constituted by human choices, preferences, or perspectives, as in the latter two.
For many philosophers, beliefs are about facts, such that when beliefs represent the facts accurately the beliefs are true, and when they fail to do so they are false. If you believe the earth is flat, your belief does not correspond to the facts and is thereby false. In contrast, if you believe the earth is round(ish), your belief does correspond to the facts and is thereby true.
The previous section of this chapter was about moral facts, the idea that, say, injustice is a property of the world about which our beliefs can be either true or false. In contrast, this section is mainly about moral beliefs, the ways that human beings judge right and wrong actions, just and unjust institutions, good and bad character. Considering the similarities and differences in people's moral beliefs, which best explains them, theism or atheism? If God existed, what would our moral beliefs be like, and are our beliefs like that? Or are our beliefs what one would expect them to be if there were no God?
This section proceeds by considering respects in which the content of what human persons tend to believe about morality is similar, after which it considers respects in which it is different. Then, the section addresses the extent to which theism can explain the similarities and differences that exist among people's moral beliefs and argues that there are serious problems with its ability to do so, insofar as the existence of God would mean a uniformity in judgment that does not seem to exist. Finally, this section sketches the ways in which atheism could explain the content of people's moral beliefs, and argues that, by comparison with theism, it does a reasonable job.
In suggesting that people hold many similar judgments about right and wrong and related categories, the claim is not that literally all people in the universe, or even all human persons, hold these same judgments. Consider an analogy. Not everyone can hear, and few who are deaf will judge a certain piece of music to be beautiful. Those who can hear might not have heard enough music, or enough of a certain kind of music, to be in a position to judge. Furthermore, some might not have been paying close enough attention to a piece of music, and so failed to detect certain features of it. Despite these kinds of exceptions, it could be fair to say that “people generally judge” a certain piece of music to be beautiful. Similar remarks apply to moral beliefs. Those capable of understanding right and wrong and who are paying close attention (on which see Audi 2014) tend to converge on some of the same beliefs.
Specifically, here are some apparent similarities among people when it comes to moral beliefs at the level of general principle. First, consider that virtually all of the world's long-standing philosophies and religions include some version of the Golden Rule (Küng and Kuschel 1993). Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and many other worldviews are explicit that one is to treat others as one would want to be treated. Second, many worldviews also accept the idea that human beings have a dignity that elevates them above the rest of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms (Christians 2010). The monotheist religions tend to say that human beings were created in the image of God or are sacred, while other worldviews without a deity, such as Confucianism, maintain that human beings have a higher moral standing and merit greater consideration than other beings.
There is also substantial agreement at the level of particular cases. If you were driving a bus and had to choose between striking a cat and a human person (who is not threatening severe harm to others), just about everyone would agree that you should aim for the cat. If there were a runaway train that would mow down ten (innocent) people tied to the track unless you pulled a switch, in which case it would kill only one person on a different track, a very large majority would agree that it would be permissible to pull the switch. If there had been a shipwreck in which your father and a stranger were stranded in the water, and you could reach only one in your life raft, you should save your father (supposing he is not a wicked man). If two men were trying to hack an elderly woman to death simply because she has a different ethnicity, and the only way to prevent the men from doing so were to shoot them with your machine gun, you would not do wrong to shoot them. Notice that these are all cases about life-and-death matters at the core of morality, that it is extremely difficult to disagree with them sincerely, and that they could be multiplied.
And yet it is implausible to maintain that there are no differences in moral beliefs, and substantial ones at that, even when it comes to central life-and-death matters. Is abortion in the first trimester, before the fetus is aware and can feel any pain, justified? Is that sort of abortion permissible just because one would rather have a girl than a boy? Supposing that meat is not needed on grounds of nutrition, is it wrong to eat meat merely because one likes the taste? Should people who have, beyond a reasonable doubt, tortured and killed other people be put to death by the state? Is it immoral to commit suicide? Would doctors be right to deliver a lethal dose of painkiller to a terminally ill patient who is mentally competent and wants it? Controversy abounds.
One might suspect that one could resolve these particular disputes by appealing to putatively shared general principles. However, the Golden Rule does not help when it comes to suicide, or any situations in which the choice is between saving two different lives—regardless of whose life is threatened, you yourself would want to be saved. In addition, the principle of treating human beings as having dignity seems too vague to prevent disagreement. Does capital punishment respect or disrespect human dignity? What about euthanasia?
In addition, there are other general principles that are frequently, but not universally, held that conflict with the Golden Rule and the principle of respect. Utilitarians hold that one should maximize happiness and minimize unhappiness, wherever and however one can. Many people in indigenous African cultures think that one should do whatever would enhance life force, an imperceptible energy that permeates everything (e.g., Dzobo 1992; Magesa 1997). Confucians maintain that you ought to strive to foster harmony, particularly harmonious relationships in which less-qualified inferiors obey more-qualified superiors who prescribe what they judge to be best for all (Chan 2014; Li 2014).
Some philosophers suggest that many moral differences are merely superficial and are really a function of different metaphysical views or varying contexts. For example, some Hindu people deem it a grave wrong to kill a cow, which seems to differ from what most Christians and Muslims believe; but these Hindus think their relatives were reborn in a cow's body, and so they share the underlying principle of not killing relatives. For another example, some Inuit people practice infanticide, and one might conclude from this that they do not value human life; but it turns out they practice infanticide only when there is a serious scarcity of food, and so, again, they can be viewed to share the principle of valuing human life (for both examples, see Rachels 2003, 23–26).
Yet it should be noted that the examples of disagreement about abortion and the death penalty do not seem similar to these sorts of cases, concerning Hindu and Inuit cultures. There can still be robust differences about abortion, the death penalty, and other topics when all the interlocutors share the same metaphysical views and are focused on the same context.
DOES GOD'S PRESENCE EXPLAIN THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES?Which account of the nature of reality best explains the similarities and differences in moral beliefs discussed in the preceding paragraphs? What must the world be like, when it comes to God's existence, in order to find the sorts of moral judgments that we encounter across the world? The discussion that follows argues that, while theism can easily account for the similarities, it has a difficult time explaining the existence of widespread and deep differences.
Theism holds that there exists an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being who created the universe with certain goals in mind. God has intended human beings to help realize at least some of those goals, which include moral purposes. With respect to these purposes, God has issued commands to human beings to perform certain actions and not to perform certain others. On the most influential versions of theism, God has issued the same commands to all human beings, which might include to glorify God (the Qurʾan) or to love one's neighbor (the Bible).
God is usually thought to have conveyed these commands in one of two ways, and perhaps both. On one hand, God has communicated directly with prophets who have, in turn, written God's word down in the form of long books (scripture), while, on the other, God has enabled human beings to use their reason to figure out the difference between right and wrong on their own (natural law). The latter approach can make sense of the intuition that even atheists who avoid religious texts could learn about morality from God (on which see Austin 2017, sec. 7d).
Those who have done what God has instructed us to do are thought by many to be given entrance into heaven, an eternal afterlife in His presence, whether because that is a deserved reward (Islam) or a generous gift (Christianity). In contrast, those who have disobeyed God's commands are thought to be destined for hell, which, at the very least, means not living forever with God, and might involve substantial suffering for an eternity.
If this account of how God interacts with us were true, one would expect a very high degree of similarity in the content of our moral beliefs. God has the same moral purposes for us, and, being omnipotent, is obviously able to inform us of them. Since it would clearly be unfair of God to hold us accountable for failing to do what He wants if He did not make us all aware of His commands, theism suggests that we should all share the same understanding of morality. However, as has been shown in the various examples above, there are substantial differences in the content of our moral beliefs.
How might the theist try to account for these differences? One strategy is to point out that the key holy text was set down in one language, and that some of God's commands have become “lost in translation” as they have been conveyed in languages other than the original Hebrew, Greek, or Arabic (depending on one's religion).
Upon reflection, though, this explanation is a poor one. Knowing everything, God would have foreseen that meanings would not get adequately conveyed in different languages and so would have laid down His commandments in all human languages. Being omnipotent, if God created human beings, He surely could compose books in all languages Himself in order to get His point across. God would be foolish to depend on unreliable human beings to do the translating. Not doing everything God could do to inform us of His commands would be both imprudent on His part, insofar as He would be unlikely to advance His goals, and also unfair to us, insofar as we could be damned for failure to do what He wants. However, God would be neither imprudent nor unfair, and so He would have ensured that everyone had access to His word in their respective languages.
At this point, the theist is likely to invoke the other way that God might convey His will, namely, by giving us the innate ability to apprehend it in the absence of a text. It would be fair of God to threaten us all with hell for not having achieved His moral ends, if we all carried inside us the ability to ascertain them. In addition, imparting such a capacity to us in the womb would be a prudent way for God to teach us, too. Just as we all can use our reason to ascertain that the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface is a straight line and that 2 + 2 = 4, so we can reflect carefully on moral matters and come to the same judgments of what God wants us to do and not to do. By this account, it is part of human nature to be able to figure out God's commands.
The problem with this natural law rationale is that it continues to predict too much uniformity in people's moral beliefs. If ascertaining the content of God's will were akin to doing basic geometry and arithmetic, then we would all have more or less the same moral views. However, we do not.
Of course, some human beings cannot judge that 2 + 2 = 4. By the same token, one might suggest that not all human beings should be expected to arrive at the same answers when it comes to morality. Some individuals are “defective,” that is, cannot reason well, and God would not hold them comparably accountable. However, it is only adults who are severely mentally incapacitated who do not know that 2 + 2 = 4, whereas plenty of mentally capacitated adults disagree about what the right course of action is when it comes to, say, abortion and the death penalty. A wide array of intelligent, mentally healthy people can and do judge what is moral, yet they are not certain of their judgments, and their judgments are hardly uniform.
Furthermore, their inability to know for sure, or to come to a consensus, is not because they are prideful or uninterested. Some philosophers humbly devote their forty-year careers to trying to determine what is right and what is wrong, but even they have not come to the same conclusions.
DOES GOD'S ABSENCE EXPLAIN THE SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES?Consider how we might have come to judge morality on an atheist worldview. Atheism holds that there is no God who created us to achieve particular purposes, and we arose as a chance product of natural selection. One atheist view that is consistent with this picture is that our deepest value judgments developed because making them helped our species to survive and to reproduce in a particular environment.
More specifically, the capacity to make moral judgments, which at the core are about how to treat other people evenhandedly, probably helped us to flourish. Those who lacked a disposition to cooperate, and instead were inclined to steal, break promises, and cheat, would have been isolated by others, making it hard to find a mate. In contrast, those who were less selfish would have had greater ease in finding a mate and thereby passing on their genes. According to this picture, it would have been useful for human beings to develop a language by which to name desirable and undesirable actions and attitudes. Humans would have started calling ways of behaving “moral” and “immoral.”
Even though natural selection would have prompted human beings to call certain behaviors moral and immoral, it does not follow that they would have a clear awareness of what precisely they were labeling with these terms (Brink 1989; Miller 1992). Consider an analogy that elucidates this point: It would have been useful for human beings to call certain conditions of the human body “illness” or “disease.” Picking out that feature of our bodies would have been particularly important when it comes to survival, reproduction, and flourishing. It does not follow, though, that human beings have known much about what disease or injury essentially is. Indeed, it is only recently that we seem to have learned much at all about how the human body works and what interferes with its proper functioning. We have known the “surface” properties of disease, such as seeing skin discoloration, or of injury, such as broken bones, for a long while, but we have not similarly known “deep” properties, such as how that discoloration is related to a malfunctioning liver or how bones really work, and what is going on when there is a malfunction in either (see Putnam 1975 for the surface/deep distinction).
Similar things probably go for what the word “immoral” picks out on an atheist worldview. We readily recognize surface properties, as in the instance of torturing others for fun or using innocent people for target practice, but we have found it hard to obtain a firm grasp of the deep properties of immorality that account for these instances and an array of others. Instead, on this picture of human development, we have to learn over time, with argumentation, what immoral behavior objectively consists of, analogous to learning experimentally over time about the nature of disease or illness. We cannot apprehend the moral facts, or at least not many of them, merely by reflecting on them as individuals and with some degree of certainty (a priori), in the way we do facts of geometry and arithmetic. Instead, we must learn about moral facts by drawing inferences in critical discussion with lots of other inquirers and on the basis of probabilities (a posteriori), similar to the way that science is done.
What does this atheist account of moral knowledge entail for the content of moral beliefs? It suggests that there will be both similarities and differences. On one hand, one would expect some similarities when it comes to the surface properties of wrongness and vice. Everyone should agree that certain actions are characteristically picked out with the word “immoral.” Torturing others for fun is obviously wrong in the way that a broken arm is obviously an injury. And that is what we find—people do tend to share some core ideas about what immorality is, as per the previous section.
Furthermore, at some point over time, one would expect more of a consensus to emerge, at least among those who have studied morality carefully. This learning process would be similar to the way that physicians have lately in the history of humanity begun to find some degree of consensus about the nature of illness, and laypeople have come to share their views. Arguably, human beings have recently come to learn that all persons have an equal moral status, that slavery for the sake of profit is immoral, that it is arbitrary to assign educational opportunities on the basis of race or gender, and that it is unjust to colonize other peoples (see Gilbert 1990).
On the other hand, the atheist picture of moral knowledge entails that there would be some substantial disagreement about what is moral and why. In the history of humanity there have been widespread differences about what is an illness and what makes it one, and, furthermore, not everyone currently believes that the scientific method has indeed revealed something substantial about those matters. By analogy, one would expect the history of humanity to reveal that there have been widespread differences in belief about what is wrong and what makes it so, and, furthermore, not everyone currently believes that systematic moral inquiry (philosophy) has indeed revealed something substantial about those matters.
On the atheist worldview, knowledge of morality would not be evenly distributed over generations of human beings or even among those of the same generation. Instead, some societies would be more mistaken than others, and their ability to learn would depend on contingent matters such as whether they have the resources to allow people to devote themselves to study and whether they have let go of unjustified beliefs about God, spirits, and souls in a spiritual realm (cf. Parfit 1984, sec. 154).
Bruce Russell, Wayne State University
How we can know, or at least be justified in believing, what morality requires, permits, and prohibits depends on what the nature of morality is. I first consider what atheists might say if morality is based on convention or is in some way subjective, depending on human sentiments or approval when appropriately situated. I then consider what atheists might say if morality is objective and more like mathematics than etiquette. I conclude that in many cases theists can agree with atheists, who are moral objectivists, regarding how we can know what is morally required, permitted, and prohibited.
THE NATURE OF MORALITYIf there were no mind-independent moral facts, it would be relatively easy for atheists to explain how humans could make, and be justified in making, moral judgments. For instance, if morality were like etiquette in being based on accepted conventions, then a person could learn to make, and be justified in making, moral judgments by learning the relevant conventions, say, to keep a promise unless great harm will result if you do. But morality seems different from etiquette. Breaking a promise, cheating, and stealing, not to mention rape and murder, are different from eating peas with a spoon. They don't seem to be merely violations of certain conventions that are adopted to coordinate behavior (as happens with conventions about which side of the road to drive on) or to relieve anxiety about how to behave in social settings (as is the case with etiquette).
Perhaps morality is not based on actual conventions but on the conventions people would adopt to govern their interactions were they to engage in rational bargaining with one another knowing their actual social positions, abilities and weaknesses, race and gender, and so on. Gilbert Harman has argued that it is in the interest of both the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless not to be harmed (1977, 110–112). However, the poor and the powerless will want a strong principle of bringing aid since they will need aid more often than the rich and powerful, who will want a weaker principle since “they would end up doing most of the helping and would receive little in return” (1977, 111). The poor and the powerless might refuse to adhere to a principle of noninjury and noninterference unless the rich and powerful agree to some principle of mutual aid. A rational bargain might then be struck where all agree to a strong principle of noninjury and noninterference and a weaker principle of mutual aid. Harman thinks that our actual morality reflects just such a distinction: people believe that duties not to harm are stricter than duties to help. If morality were based on this sort of rational bargaining (Harman calls it implicit or tacit bargaining), we could figure out what morality requires by reasoning about what a rational bargain between people who will interact with each other would be, given that they all have full knowledge of the situation they are in.
But this account of morality also seems to allow for immoral rules or conventions. A strong religious or racist majority could bargain to restrict the days on which a religious minority could practice its religion, or bargain to ban interracial marriage in exchange, say, for civil unions for interracial couples. A way around this objection would be to require that the bargainers reason from behind a veil of ignorance, which prevents them from knowing any particular facts about themselves, say, whether they are rich and powerful or poor and powerless, whether they are men or women, gay or straight, a member of some majority or of a minority, of this or that ethnic or racial origin, whether they have skills that are much in demand or lack them, and so on. Reasoning from behind a veil of ignorance would ensure that the rules or conventions agreed to are impartial, which seems a requirement of moral rules. Of course, this is the sort of approach to questions of social justice adopted by John Rawls in his famous work A Theory of Justice (1971). Perhaps it could be expanded to become the basis for a complete theory of morality.
Other approaches to morality that atheists might accept do not involve bargaining, whether actual or hypothetical, or choice from behind a veil of ignorance. According to these views, what is morally required is determined by what people would want or approve of when ideally situated. So, on this account, what morality requires is determined by the rules they would want, or approve of, to govern their interactions were they fully informed and “procedurally rational,” meaning that they do not make mistakes in reasoning by accepting invalid arguments or thinking that something counts as evidence for something else when it really does not. Some might add, as David Hume did, that what these people want or approve of must rest on sentiments “common to all mankind,” which for him meant sympathy. To avoid the problem with actual bargaining views of morality, the sentiments and desires of the ideal agents should, in some sense, be impartial, not self-interested. Otherwise, we may either end up with what are intuitively immoral rules or no rules at all because none are in everyone's self-interest.
The worry about this view, which we might call ideal subjectivism, is that it still allows what are intuitively immoral rules to be approved or chosen. If only humans are ideal agents, they might approve of destroying an alien civilization, if there are any, or allowing animals to be harmed and to suffer needlessly. If ideal agents consist of all rational agents, they still might approve of rules that permit current generations to use up resources that leave future generations very badly off and may not solve the problem of animal suffering. If we required that future generations also be represented as ideal subjects, we face the opposite problem: future generations might only approve of rules that require the current generation to make huge sacrifices for their sakes.
Many atheists reject convention-, sentiment-, and desire-based views of morality, at least partly because of the objections to them that have been raised. They think that morality is mind-independent, that it is like science, mathematics, or logic. Both Peter Railton and Derek Parfit see morality this way. They reject conceptual analysis as the right approach to determine what the fundamental moral principles are, which some think is the right approach to determine what the fundamental natures of knowledge, persons, and personal identity are. Conceptual analysis aims to give necessary and sufficient conditions of a concept that are meant to capture its meaning. Though not of much philosophical interest, standard examples of such analyses include: (1) X is a bachelor if and only if X is an unmarried male of marriageable status; (2) X is a square if and only if X is a four-sided plane figure all of whose sides and angles are equal. Philosophers tried to analyze the concept of knowledge and ran into the Gettier problem. Edmund Gettier (1963) showed that knowledge is not justified true belief because there are examples of justified true belief that are not cases of knowledge, in that a person is in some sense “lucky” to believe what is true. Attempts were made to give an account of “lucky,” and none gained wide acceptance because a host of counterexamples to every proposed solution were produced. Perhaps because of these sorts of failure, or perhaps because of G. E. Moore's open question argument (for more information, see Moore in his Principia Ethica [1903]) and similar arguments to show that it is impossible to analyze normative concepts in terms that are purely descriptive, most moral philosophers have given up trying to offer an analysis of “right” or “wrong” (cf. Adams 1999, 15). Even if they think that it is necessarily true that: (3) An action is morally obligatory if and only if it produces more good, on balance, than any other alternative open to the agent (or less bad, on balance, if none produces good on balance), they do not think that (3) gives the meaning of “morally obligatory.”
Railton has been influenced by Saul Kripke, whose work allows us to distinguish between concepts, the analysis of concepts, and properties. The concept <water> is a different concept from the concept <H2O> even though those concepts refer to the same property, namely, being composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. And it is necessarily true that water is H2O even though this can only be known empirically, not a priori. Similar things are true with respect to the concept <heat> and the concept <average molecular kinetic energy>: necessarily, heat is average molecular kinetic energy, but this could only be discovered empirically, not a priori, and this necessary truth does not give the meaning of “heat.”
Railton's approach is first to figure out what the job description of, say, <wrong> is, which some call the conceptual role, reference fixing description, or complex role of <wrong>. He says the following about the job description for <heat>:
Such a “job description” need not be a conceptual analysis properly so called, since it involves a great deal of substantive empirical content and since any of its particular elements—detailing conceptual interrelations, causal or constitutive connections, paradigm cases, etc.—might in turn be revised or abandoned without leading us to abandon the phenomenological concept <heat> altogether. (Railton 2017a, 49; Railton's italics)
I assume that Railton would say something similar about the job description for <morally wrong>. It would “not be a conceptual analysis properly so called,” and would include empirical content and even what seem to be necessary moral truths such as: it is wrong to torture children to death for the fun of it, or cruelty for its own sake is wrong. It can contain statements about the relation of obligation to motivation and what it means to say “ought implies can.” The job description might also contain what might be called statements of the pragmatics of <wrong>, that is, claims about what people typically do when they say, or think, that an action is wrong. Of course, if the point of formulating the job description is to help us find what the essence of wrong is, as it is in the case of water and heat, the worry is that by including empirical and pragmatic elements in the job description we will be led astray.
The second step in the method Railton proposes is to find what property uniquely, or best, fits the job description. Railton says that he accepts what he calls “methodological naturalism,” which is not a metaphysical position but a view about how to acquire justified beliefs. Railton says that methodological naturalism is “the view that, in inquiry, we should try to proceed by following the ways of observing, hypothesis-forming, testing, formal modeling, axiomatizing, and explaining that have been so successful in the natural, biological, social, and mathematical sciences” (2017a, 45). In this passage, Railton seems to be endorsing an empirical approach to discovering necessary truths about what makes actions right and wrong, though perhaps not entirely empirical given his inclusion of the “mathematical sciences” at the end of his characterization of the method.
Parfit is a nonnaturalist about normative (including moral) properties because he thinks that they are not reducible to natural properties. Natural properties are properties that, in principle, can be discovered by empirical means. He believes that there are normative truths; these truths “are not natural, empirically discoverable facts, since we could not have empirical evidence either for or against our beliefs in these truths” (2017, Vol. 3, 3; cf. Vol. 3, 58; see also Adams 1999, 81, 365). Even if utilitarianism were true, it seems impossible to know this through empirical evidence. We might learn through empirical investigation that most people are utilitarians, or that they become utilitarians once they have reflected on what morality requires, but that empirical evidence would not be evidence that utilitarianism is true, only that people accept it.
T. M. Scanlon offers an a priori approach to discovering what morality requires and prohibits. He defends what he calls a domain-specific account of standards that should be used to discover truths in various domains. Science has its standards, which include induction and inference to the best explanation, to discover truths about the world. Mathematics has its standards, which include deduction from axioms to discover mathematical truths. Scanlon thinks that the method for discovering normative, including moral, truths is reflective equilibrium.
This method is founded on what, following Rawls, Scanlon calls considered moral judgments, by which he means judgments that are founded on what seems obviously true to someone when that person is “in the right conditions” (2014, 82–83, 85–86). He says that a judgment is a considered judgment only if the proposition that is its object seems clearly true after the person has been unable to discover any “implausible implications or presuppositions” of that proposition (2014, 84). Those judgments may be about cases (say, that it is wrong to take the vital organs from one healthy person without his consent to transplant into five people to save their lives) or about principles, say, that you ought to do what produces the most good on balance. Reflective equilibrium is the process by which you reconcile any inconsistencies between considered moral judgments at any level of generality. This can be done by either giving up considered judgments about cases or by giving up or modifying principles that are the objects of considered judgments. In the end, you look for a coherent system of judgments where the principles explain the considered judgments on cases that survive the search for consistency. A utilitarian principle could explain why in triage situations you should do what saves the most lives, and a principle prohibiting using people as mere means could explain why we should not take the organs from one to save five. So a principle consistent with considered judgments in transplant, triage, and other examples might be: Do what produces the most good on balance unless that requires using someone as a mere means; in that case, do not use the person as a mere means unless that is the only way to prevent harm or death to a large number of people.
Robert Adams accepts a divine command theory of moral obligation. He thinks that wrongness is the property of being contrary to the revealed commands of a loving God (1979, 76). Adams thinks that it is necessarily true that we are obligated to do what a loving God commands and that it is wrong to do what is contrary to his commands (1979, 67; 1999, chap. 11). He accepts this view on the basis of a semantic view like Railton's. Adams even notes his agreement with Railton at the semantic level (1999, 27). He says that wrongness “will be the property of actions (if there is one) that best fills the role assigned to wrongness by the concept” (1979, 74; 1999, 15–18). By “the concept” Adams means what Railton means by the “job description.” However, Adams differs from Railton at the metaphysical level in that he is a supernaturalist while Railton is a naturalist (cf. Adams 1999, 27). They differ on what best fits the relevant job description or conceptual role of wrong.
MORAL EPISTEMOLOGYTo settle the metaphysical question about the nature of morality we would have to determine what the appropriate job description is and then look carefully to see if Adams's divine command theory, another nonnaturalistic theory like Parfit's, or some naturalistic theory like Railton's, best fits that job description. But those semantic and metaphysical issues are not the concern of this discussion. What is partly of concern is whether a theistic ethics must adopt a different epistemology from an atheistic ethics. Adams argues that it need not. According to him, what is right and wrong is determined by God's commands. But what justifies us in thinking that God commands this rather than that? Adams finds it unimaginable that God would command Abraham to kill his son Isaac, so not even what is written in holy books can be uncritically accepted (1999, 290). Adams adds that a command not to commit murder requires interpretation (1999, 273). Is turning off a respirator murder (1999, 273)? How about abortion? Suppose we know that God commands us to love him with all our heart, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Still, what behavior is required by this command? How do we know what that behavior is?
Even if we adopt a conceptual role semantics and a theistic metaphysics of morals, for a complete metaethics we need some epistemology of value (as Adams calls it) that tells us what justifies us in believing, or provides knowledge, that God commands this and not that. Following William Alston, Adams adopts a doxastic practice epistemology (1999, 357). By a “doxastic practice,” Adams means “a suitably integrated set of such skills and habits [highly developed, socially acquired, and which we have compelling reason to trust], a system of forming and holding beliefs, learned in a social context” (1999, 357).
Evaluative doxastic practices involve inputs that include feelings, emotions, inclinations, desires, intuitions, and also evaluative beliefs, and they have evaluative beliefs or judgments as outputs. What the outputs are is influenced by background beliefs and reasons that can affect the weighting of the various inputs. Adams thinks that the most fundamental doxastic practices were taught to us in childhood by our parents and others (1999, 354, 360). And he thinks people who have grown up in different doxastic practices can have different beliefs as a result. (See Adams 1999, 356–366, for his general discussion of doxastic practices.)
Atheists, as well as theists, can engage in evaluative doxastic practices to reach evaluative conclusions. Adams says that his epistemology “does not require us to know anything about God, as such, before we can have knowledge, or adequately grounded belief, in ethics” (1999, 355). He thinks what he calls “general revelation” from God can be accessed through evaluative doxastic practices and says, “I cannot regard the recognition of moral truths as an exclusive possession of theists, let alone a particular religious tradition…. The generality of general revelation means that it can be received by adherents of any religious tradition or none at all” (1999, 364).
Adams compares moral knowledge of what actions are right and wrong possessed by people who are ignorant of the metaphysical nature of right and wrong to knowledge of the ordinary properties of water possessed by people who are ignorant of the metaphysical nature of water, namely its being identical to H2O (1999, 355). And he points out that a person could know a lot of mathematical truths even if he was ignorant of the metaphysical status of numbers (1999, 355–356). Adams goes even further in saying beliefs about what is right and wrong precede knowledge of the metaphysical nature of right and wrong because these beliefs enter into the determination of the conceptual role (the job description) of right and wrong (1999, 356). That conceptual role fixes the reference of these moral terms and the metaphysical nature of right and wrong is what best fits that role.
People can disagree about what the correct normative and moral epistemology is: for Railton it is empirical, for Scanlon it is largely a priori and involves reflective equilibrium, and for Adams it involves doxastic practices. While the metaphysical foundations of morality will be different for theists and atheists, both can hold that the correct epistemology of value allows atheists and theists to have “knowledge, or adequately grounded belief, in ethics” (Adams 1999, 355). A different metaphysics of morals does not necessarily imply a different epistemology of morals, and there are several different moral epistemologies that permit both theists and atheists to have moral knowledge of what actions are right and wrong, and even of what a loving person, whether human or God, would will.
MORAL CAPACITYEven if atheists and theists agree that we can know what is required, permitted, and prohibited by morality, either empirically or through reason, a puzzle remains about our having a capacity to know the moral status of actions and whether people are virtuous or vicious. We can literally see some boys pour gasoline on a cat and set it on fire (Harman 1977, 4), but we cannot see with our eyes the wrongness of their action. We can see Mother Teresa relieve the suffering of starving, injured, or ill people, but we cannot literally see her goodness. So if there are objective moral facts, theists might seem to have the best answer: God implanted a conscience in everyone, which is a sort of moral sense, and conscience allows all of us, whether theists or atheists, to grasp objective moral principles that we can then apply to specific cases. Atheists can say the capacity to reason has an evolutionary advantage for creatures who possess it and that reason can develop in a way that allows us to grasp objective truths that are not always advantageous from the standpoint of reproduction and survival. No doubt the ability to do simple arithmetic was advantageous to our ancestors. As Parfit has said, if one of our ancestors saw three lions go into a cave and only two come out, it would be advantageous for him if he could do subtraction and thereby conclude that one still remains in the cave. Starting from these humble practical beginnings, humans have been able through their reason to develop sophisticated mathematical theories, including number theories (Parfit 2011, vol. 2, 496).
Similarly, it is sometimes advantageous to cooperate with others rather than going it alone. It seems plausible to think that people with a disposition to cooperate with others in mutually advantageous ways would be favored by evolution. And such a disposition to cooperate would seem to require a disposition to keep promises, to tell the truth, not to cheat, and so on. Morality developed from these humble beginnings, when people applied reason to draw further moral conclusions. Why should we treat members of a rival tribe differently from ourselves when it would be mutually beneficial to cooperate with them instead of always being at war? And why treat them differently even if cooperation was not beneficial, at least if it was not harmful to us? Why should women be treated differently than men? They have the same feelings and intellectual capacities that men have. Why should we cause animals to suffer needlessly? They experience pain just as we do, and we could live just as well without harming them. Reason, which initially provided an evolutionary advantage by helping us to determine the best means for satisfying our ends of survival and reproduction, came with a power of its own to address such questions. Having reason with powers beyond what is useful for survival and reproduction is like having eyes that not only allow us to see predators, distant forest fires, and approaching storms but also what is happening on the moon.
Theists might reply that it would be a weakness in evolutionary theory if it could not explain why people have a capacity to see with their eyes what is happening on the moon, and why reason has a capacity to answer moral and mathematical questions that have no evolutionary advantage. But as long as having that capacity is not disadvantageous, evolutionary theory need not be able to explain it. Evolutionary theory should be able to explain why gazelles can run faster than lions, but it would be no mark against it if it could not explain why they are much faster than lions. No doubt there would be some as yet unknown detailed genetic explanation of their ability to run much faster that goes beyond any evolutionary explanation. It seems plausible to think that there is some as yet unknown detailed genetic explanation of the brain's capacity to grasp objective mathematical and moral truths. Even if Scanlon is wrong in thinking that moral truths just are the moral propositions arrived at when reflective equilibrium is correctly applied, it does seem necessarily true that we are justified in believing that something is a moral truth when reflective equilibrium is correctly applied.
Not only can atheists explain how we know, or are justified in believing, objective moral truths, if it is not reasonable to believe that God exists, then it will not be reasonable to believe that God created us with a conscience, or even a kind of reason, that allows us to grasp moral truths. If it is not unreasonable to believe that God exists, it will be hard to explain why there is so much moral disagreement if God created everyone with the same sort of moral conscience or why he did not create everyone with that sort of conscience if he created different people with different moral consciences. Perhaps theists will say that people are born with the same moral conscience, but they have corrupted it through sin. But such an auxiliary hypothesis needs support if it is to save the view that God created everyone with the same sort of moral conscience.
Atheists also have to account for moral disagreement. It can partly be explained by partiality: people often favor themselves and those for whom they care, and this can skew their moral judgments. At the end of Reasons and Persons, Parfit is optimistic about the prospects of moral agreement, saying that moral reasoning, freed from the influence of religion, “is a very recent event” (1984, 454). He sees religion itself as an obstacle that must be overcome for greater moral agreement to emerge.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, it were a toss-up whether the atheist or theist has the best explanation of moral disagreement, leaving questions about the existence of God aside. Still, I believe that arguments against the existence of God, and in particular the argument from evil, would break the tie. So, all things considered, we should accept the atheistic explanation of our capacity to know objective moral truths. It is a plausible account that parallels an atheistic account of how we have a capacity to know objective mathematical truths. Furthermore, it does not require positing the existence of an immaterial being who somehow implants a moral sense or capacity in people.
David Neil, University of Wollongong
So far this chapter has assessed theistic and nontheistic conceptions of ethics with regard to moral realism, the diversity of moral belief, and the nature of moral judgment. Another approach to comparative evaluation is to focus on substantive normative claims that are widely accepted, and to ask whether theistic or nontheistic approaches can provide the best explanation of those norms. For the purpose of this discussion, the focus will be on human rights. Is the global ascent of human rights a secular phenomenon, or does the very idea of human rights require a religious underpinning?
Charles Beitz makes an important distinction between “orthodox” and “practical” conceptions of human rights. The orthodox conception “is the idea that human rights have an existence in the moral order that is independent of their expression in international doctrine” (Beitz 2004, 196). On this view, persons possess human rights simply in virtue of being human, and the instruments of human rights law, such as international covenants, ultimately draw their authority from this moral foundation. The practical conception, by contrast, “takes the doctrine and discourse of human rights as we find them in international political practice as basic” (Beitz 2004, 197). Human rights have functional roles in international discourse, and those functions determine both what human rights are and what human rights there are. The practical conception is not committed to denying any fundamental moral foundation for international human rights. Rather the practical approach treats questions about the nature of human rights as separable from questions about the moral justification of human rights. On this view, human rights advocates could conceivably agree about the form and content of human rights while disagreeing as to how those rights are grounded (Beitz 2004, 197).
The practical conception appears to align with the strategy adopted in drafting the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), such that forty-eight of the then fifty-eight members of the United Nations (UN) were able to ratify it (UN General Assembly 1948). The UDHR contained no enforcement mechanism, and it was not legally binding. The decades since the UN General Assembly's adoption of the UDHR have seen no shortage of crimes against humanity, and the world still lacks effective institutions and procedures that can protect the vulnerable against state-sponsored violence. Yet the UDHR is undoubtedly one of the most consequential documents of the twentieth century. The prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson describes the UDHR as an “imperishable statement that has inspired more than 200 international treaties, conventions and declarations, and the bills of rights found in almost every national constitution adopted since the war” (Robertson 2013, 42).
Along with the Geneva Conventions, the UDHR was drafted in the climate of moral urgency that followed the Nuremberg trials (1945–1946), in which former Nazi leaders were brought before the International Military Tribunal on charges of war crimes. Its preamble asserts that “the barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind” were the consequence of “disregard and contempt for human rights” and declares “freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want” as the “highest aspiration of the common people.” Viewed in historical context, the UDHR was not an assertion of the universal validity of Western values. Rather, in the words of Michael Ignatieff, it was “a war-weary generation's reflection on European nihilism and its consequences” (Ignatieff 2001, 4). Ignatieff describes the UDHR as representing a return to the natural law heritage of European law, intended to promote the agency of citizens to stand up to the orders of an unjust state. The Nuremberg trials were a pivotal moment in international law because they brought the first indictments of political leaders for crimes against humanity. By asserting that a state's treatment of its citizens must manifest a basic respect for their human dignity, the trials directly challenged the Westphalian principle of state sovereignty and the international law principle of sovereign immunity. It is perhaps because the postwar understanding of human rights stresses their function of imposing moral limits on sovereign power that human rights discourse proved so effective for a broad range of political movements in the latter half of the twentieth century. From the 1950s the so-called human rights revolution (that is, the global deployment of human rights discourse in anticolonial revolutions, labor struggles, civil rights struggles, and other forms of political activism) transformed human rights into the primary tool of argumentation for social justice movements (Iriye, Goedde, and Hitchcock 2012).
However, the success of human rights in international politics and law has been achieved by defining human rights only at the level of practice and abstaining from theoretical commitments as to their basis and justification. The UDHR was able to be ratified by communist and capitalist states, by countries with state religions and countries with constitutional separation of church and state, because the text maintained a strict neutrality with respect to both religion and ideology. The Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who was involved in the drafting of the UDHR, relates an anecdote: at a meeting of the UNESCO National Commission where human rights were being discussed, “someone expressed astonishment that certain champions of violently opposed ideologies had agreed on a list of those rights. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘we agree about the rights but on condition that no one asks us why”’ (UNESCO 1949, 1). In his introduction to the UNESCO symposium on human rights, Maritain further states:
Where it is a question of rational interpretation and justifications of speculation or theory, the problem of Human Rights involves the whole structure of moral and metaphysical (or antimetaphysical) convictions held by each of us. So long as minds are not united in faith or philosophy, there will be mutual conflicts between interpretations and justifications. In the field of practical conclusions, on the other hand, agreement on a joint declaration is possible, given an approach pragmatic rather than theoretical and cooperation in the comparison, recasting and fixing of formulae, to make them acceptable to both parties as points of convergence in practice, however opposed the theoretic viewpoints. (UNESCO 1949, 3)
This conviction about the possibility and value of “convergence in practice” lies at the core of John Rawls's approach to human rights in The Law of Peoples. In pluralist societies, neither religious, philosophical, nor moral unity is possible. Therefore, social stability “must be rooted in a reasonable political conception of right and justice affirmed by an overlapping consensus of comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 1999, 16). For Rawls, human rights belong to a “reasonable political conception of right” precisely insofar as they do not presuppose any particular theistic, metaphysical, or metaethical premises.
These rights do not depend on any particular comprehensive religious doctrine or philosophical doctrine of human nature. The Law of Peoples does not say, for example, that human beings are moral persons and have equal worth in the eyes of God; or that they have certain moral and intellectual powers that entitle them to these rights…. Still, the Law of Peoples does not deny these doctrines. (Rawls 1999, 68)
One important reason why human rights discourse has been able to acquire the political and legal authority that it has is that the human rights project has been conceived as a project of formalizing what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.” At the level of practice, there is broad agreement between mainstream theistic and atheistic ethical systems on the importance of human rights as goals and standards for moral progress in the world.
Yet, despite the pragmatism with which the foundational instruments of human rights protection were constructed, the UDHR and the key treaties that followed it cannot actually be classed as “practical” conceptions of human rights in Beitz's sense. This is because UN-authored human rights documents allude to an objective moral foundation for human rights, in human dignity. In the UDHR, a connection between human rights and dignity is implied but unspecified. Subsequently, in both of the 1966 International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights we find the explicit declaration that the human rights they enumerate are derived from human dignity (UN General Assembly 1966). This claim that human rights derive from human dignity has since been reiterated in other UN declarations (e.g., the 1993 Vienna Declaration), but all official references to human dignity carefully avoid imputing any religious or metaphysical content to that term.
For any orthodox theory of human rights, human rights declarations, treaties, charters, and laws do not create human rights. Human rights exist prior to and independently of the texts that aim to define, enact, and protect them. The concept of a human right is a right that one has simply in virtue of being human. Although the UN nowhere defines the meaning of “dignity,” the reference to human dignity as the source of human rights can only be read as the claim that humanness carries some innate value or moral worth, from which substantive, deontic norms can be derived.
The most basic theoretical problem for any orthodox theory is explaining why being a member of the species Homo sapiens is both a necessary and sufficient condition for possessing human rights. Here we find a crucial difference between theistic and nontheistic accounts. A number of theologians and religious philosophers have argued that human rights require a religious foundation and that secular theories of human rights are untenable (see Perry 2006; Küng 1991; Stackhouse 2005; and the Organization of the Islamic Conference 1990). Any secular theory that endorses the uniquely human character of human rights needs to explain the moral significance of humanness without appealing to notions of human sacredness or the sanctity of human life. Because a survey of the key figures on this terrain is well beyond the scope of this section, for the purpose of illustration I briefly contrast just two approaches to this question, one theistic and one nontheistic.
A THEISTIC APPROACHThe Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff asks what the project of trying to ground human rights in human dignity requires, arguing that no secular ground for human rights is possible (Wolterstorff 2008, 319, 323–341). That project demands an explanation of why all and only human beings possess a dignity that makes them morally inviolate in just the ways specified by human rights declarations. Given that any secular grounding of human rights cannot appeal to sacredness to explain the inviolability of every human, such approaches must identify some capacity humans possess, which is posited as the source and ground of human dignity.
Immanuel Kant provides perhaps the most influential capacity-based account of human dignity. For Kant, personhood arises from the capacity for rationality, through which humans are able to grasp the moral law and to make the moral law the governing motive of the will. Against Kant, Wolterstorff contends that rationality cannot be the ground of human dignity because it is not possessed by all humans (it is lacking in babies and the cognitively impaired, for example). It is a capacity that a human person can lose without thereby losing his or her moral worth. It is also likely that some nonhuman animals possess reasoning abilities superior to some humans. Most important, however, rationality is a spectrum capacity. Some humans have significantly greater rational capacities than others. Any analysis that reduces dignity to the capacity for reason has the consequence that humans with greater rational powers also possess greater dignity, and hence greater moral worth, than others. Wolterstorff claims that an objection of the same form can be extended to any capacity-based account of human moral worth. For any capacity that might plausibly by identified with human dignity, not all humans will possess that capacity, even potentially. And given the unequal distribution of every capacity across the human race, capacity approaches cannot explain why dignity attaches to humanness and only to humanness in such a way as to confer dignity and moral value equally on every human being.
In Wolterstorff's view, a commitment to human rights requires that every member of the species Homo sapiens is accorded a sacredness that other species do not possess. Human sacredness can only be grounded theistically, and that ground is found in the biblical doctrine that humans bear the image of God. The argument proceeds via a lengthy discussion about how the imago dei should be interpreted, which cannot be summarized here. The crucial claim, however, is that (correctly interpreted) the imago dei is an essential aspect of human nature, and that God loves “equally and permanently” (Wolterstorff 2008, 352) every creature that bears the imago dei, thus bestowing all humans with a special moral worth.
A NONTHEISTIC APPROACHJames Griffin, in his highly influential book On Human Rights (2008), takes on the task that Wolterstorff declares impossible for secular ethics. Griffin traces the concept of human rights to medieval theories of natural law, a law that was believed to be manifest in the form of innate, action-guiding, moral dispositions implanted in humans by God. Natural rights, understood as entitlements a person has, first appeared as a corollary of natural law. During the Enlightenment the theological content of natural rights was stripped away, and natural rights came to be understood as accessible through reason alone. The French Revolution's 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man formalizes both the secularization of natural rights and their rebranding as human rights. The language of human rights largely fell out of favor in the nineteenth century, and was emphatically rehabilitated after World War II. The contemporary understanding of a human right is continuous with the Enlightenment notion of “a right that we have simply in virtue of being human” (Griffin 2008, 2). However, when the theological content of natural right was abandoned, “nothing was put in its place” (Griffin 2008, 2): the concept of human rights we have inherited from the Enlightenment is indeterminate. A consequence of this indeterminacy of sense is that arguments about what human rights there are, how those rights should be understood, and how conflicts of rights should be adjudicated, are undecidable. Lacking clear criteria for the application of the concept of a human right, “we often have only a tenuous, and sometimes a plainly inadequate, grasp on what is at issue” (Griffin 2008, 2).
Griffin's project is to remedy the indeterminacy of human rights, articulating what they are, how they are derived, and the role they have in ethical theory. Rather than attempt here to give a précis of a book-length argument, I will focus on Griffin's interpretation of dignity in the phrase “the dignity of the human person” (Griffin 2008, 6). For Griffin, the notion of dignity that is relevant for human rights is profoundly connected with human agency: “Human life is different from the life of other animals. We human beings have a conception of ourselves and of our past and future. We reflect and assess. We form pictures of what a good life would be…. And we try to realize these pictures. This is what we mean by a distinctively human existence” (Griffin 2008, 32).
Griffin variously refers to this essentially human power as “personhood,” “autonomy,” and “normative agency.” The claim is not that human rights are derived from normative agency. Rather, the proposal is that defining the basic function of human rights as the protection of normative agency makes the concept determinate in a way that best preserves its role in ethics. We can see how the most basic and uncontroversial human rights—the rights to life, liberty, physical security, freedom of speech, conscience, religion, and association—are all essential for the enjoyment of meaningful normative agency.
Griffin insists that normative agency is not merely instrumentally valuable. It should be understood as an end in itself. The effort of self-direction makes our lives more meaningful, independently of whether our plans and our efforts are successful. Our dignity as human persons, then, consists in our status as autonomous beings, a status that can be destroyed or compromised when our human rights are violated.
Atheists and theists can agree, to a large extent, on what rights belong on the list of human rights. However, religious and secular theorists follow very different paths in explaining the basis of human rights, and each path has distinct advantages and disadvantages. Those who believe in a loving God have a more straightforward explanation of how it could be that all human beings possess an innate moral worth to an equal degree. That special form of value is bestowed by God on all humans and only on humans. Without recourse to the notion of sacredness, secular ethics faces the challenge of identifying the human capacity or attributes that warrant the protection of human rights, and that are sufficiently universal to explain the universality of human rights. Griffin's account of normative agency is one way. Of course, there are several other theories. Griffin is right, though, that human rights discourse is vague. This indeterminacy of human rights makes it impossible to give principled answers to practical problems about the scope and boundaries of specific rights, about their application in hard cases, and about how to resolve conflicts between rights. Some human rights aim to protect people from violence and oppression. Others aim to guarantee some minimum level of opportunity to lead a worthwhile life. A theoretical specification of the rights protections a person needs in order to construct a life that is properly her own must be informed by a theory of personhood, of what persons need to flourish, and of the ways in which personhood can be damaged or lost. If we accept that modern human rights doctrine is an outline plan from which a lot of essential detail is missing, then we should also accept that the resources of secular ethics are needed to supply the details.
An account of why humans have an innate moral value, which makes each human irreplaceable, is not the same as an account of what makes a human life valuable to the person whose life it is. These are distinct kinds of value. Crucially, the second kind of value can be gained or lost, but not the first kind. For example, a person experiencing unbearable suffering in the final stages of a terminal illness may rationally judge that life has lost all value and may wish to die. Yet that person still possesses the first kind of value and rightly commands the respect that follows from the fact that he or she is still a human being. Indeed, we extend that form of respect to the dead.
Our conception of human rights is answerable to both of these types of moral value. One way to characterize the difference between theistic and nontheistic theories of human rights is that theistic accounts tend to treat the first kind of value—the innate value of human life—as both independent of, and morally more important than, the second kind of value—the value one places on one's own life as it is subjectively experienced. Secular accounts largely focus on the second kind of value—on how life is valued from the inside—and tend to treat the first kind of value as, in some way, derived from the second. As a generalization, that is, of course, also an oversimplification. This contrast is by no means offered as an exceptionless taxonomic rule. However, I hope it is a useful way to bring into focus one fundamental difference between religious and secular theories of human rights.
CHAPTER REVIEWThis chapter examines whether general facts about morality, and the human capacity to make moral judgments, count in favor of theism or atheism.
The first section assumes moral realism and argues that God's will cannot be the source of moral reasons. Divine command theories face the Euthyphro problem: the dilemma of whether God commands right actions because they are right, or whether right actions are right because God commands them. In order to hold that moral reasons are born from God's will, the theist must believe that moral obligations do not arise from the natural facts alone. Thibodeau shows that a divine command account of morality cannot meet this challenge. The price of insisting on a divine command morality, in which God's commands are not determined by objective moral properties, is that such a view renders the connection between normative reasons and moral obligation unintelligible.
The second section considers whether the similarities and differences in the moral codes of different peoples are more readily explained from a theistic or atheistic standpoint. Metz contends that, if an omnipotent God communicated a single set of moral commands to all human beings, and made entry to heaven conditional on observance of those commands, it is hard to explain why we do not find far greater convergence in moral belief than there actually is. Atheism is consistent with the view that morality developed because it enabled forms of social cooperation that contributed to human survival and flourishing. If systems of morality evolved separately and in parallel, we would expect some fundamental similarities, arising from our common biological needs and vulnerabilities—and we would also expect many differences arising from the divergent developmental paths of different peoples and their cultures. An account of morality as something that emerges and develops within the history of human development provides a more plausible explanation of the plurality of moral systems.
The third section assesses whether atheists can hold that moral judgments are objective and truth-assessable. A common charge against atheistic ethics is that the practice of moral judgment appears to presuppose moral objectivism, and moral objectivism, the theist claims, requires a religious foundation. Atheistic ethics, here, refers to any metaethical theory in which God does not play an explanatory role. Bruce Russell shows that even views that find ethics in convention, social contract, or subjective moral dispositions can still make sense of practices of moral reasoning, and can hold that there are right answers to moral questions. However, there are atheistic ethical theories that comprehend morality as objective and mind-independent. These views assert that there are moral truths than can be known, just as there are knowable scientific truths. So it is not true that atheists must deny either rationality of moral judgment or the objectivity of moral facts. Russell also points out that moral epistemology is substantially independent of the metaphysics of morals. Despite their metaphysical disagreements, theists and atheists can share an epistemology that adequately grounds their ethical beliefs, irrespective of the truth or falsity of their moral metaphysics.
The final section looks at the rapid embrace of human rights, after World War II, as moving toward universal acceptance of the moral value of every human individual, and considers whether the idea of human rights has religious or secular foundations. The political project of achieving international acceptance of human rights, and of creating enforcement mechanisms in international law, has been successful because declarations and treaties have largely avoided any metaethical claims about the foundation of human rights. Here also we find that theists and atheists, despite their metaphysical differences, can find substantial agreement on the content of human rights. However, the idea of human rights does appear to presuppose that membership in the human species carries an inherent dignity that attaches to all human beings and only to human beings. Theists claim that humans can possess an inherent dignity only if it is bestowed by a loving God. There are, however, compelling atheistic accounts of human dignity that focus on what constitutes a distinctively human mode of existence. David Neil suggests that the dispute between theistic and atheistic accounts of human rights derives from fundamental differences concerning the source of human values and the value of humans. A commitment to human rights does not present a risk of self-contradiction for either theists or atheists, but theists and atheists must construct their theories of human rights from different resources.
This chapter considers moral realism, our capacity for moral judgment, the diversity of systems of moral belief, and the normative force of human rights. It argues that the justification of moral practice, as we ordinarily understand it, does not require belief in God. Indeed, in some areas of ethical theory, atheism has explanatory advantages over theism.
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