Balkinization: Green on God and morality

Comments:

Thanks for the useful clarifications, Chris.

Let me ask you this:

1. Do you agree that although the statement "Elizabeth II is the present Queen of England" is meaningful for the reasons Kripke described, it is also not true in all possible worlds? (I switched from Superman only because he doesn't, in fact, exist in this possible world, so far as I know.)

2. If so, can you try and present a reasoned argument for why the entity we would label "God" has a good nature in all possible worlds? Because unless you make goodness analytically part of the definition of God, it is extremely hard to follow why you would feel comfortable making that claim. It might be difficult for you to imagine God being bad in some universe that might exist, but it is very hard to sustain the claim that that would not be possible. Much harder, I think, than it is to show that God in fact exists, which is already a challenge for those seeking to make an evidentiary claim, rather than one premised only on faith.

The problem I have with your approach is that you write that God is an ontological ground, or truthmaker, in your system, but then you seem very clearly to have other criterion for assessing goodness than God's nature, given your willingness to disobey a hypothetically non-good God. It seems like your fall-back position, the grounding in an impersonal moral law, might actually be your true method of assessing moral truth, given your willingness to hew to it despite the contrary commands of a possible God.

It also seems to me that this whole discussion (and the many similar discussions through the ages) develop probelmmatically because of the pervasive failure to address an important foundational question in metaethics: what do we conceive the nature of moral obligation to be? What does it mean, really, to say that we "ought" to do a thing? I think the obligation words (ought, should, etc) are one of the most fertile examples of ever-shifting Wittgensteinian language games in our discourse; they easily slide from expressing prudential ideas, to religious ideas, to our own personal preferences, to the expectations of our larger social groups. The hardest sense to pin down, however, is this classical sense of "rules" that are somehow external to other human systems of compulsion. In other words, unless we can make some headway towards figuring out what moral rules actually are, we may very well turn circles around each other in trying to assess where they come from, or what makes them true.

I'm sure some commenters will object that this is one level of esoterica too far, but I think that if we are going to seriously engage with questions of moral ontology, we have to grapple with this sort of metaethical problem first, because until we do, it is much harder to address the merits of claims that a particular property is a moral truthmaker.

# posted by

Unknown : 4:14 AM

Reduced to it's essentials, I see Chris Green's (CG) argument to be:

- Morals must be universally true.
- Thus, they require "truthmakers" (TM).
- Theists have a candidate TM: "God"; atheists have none.
- Andrew Koppelman (AK) objects that CG's "God" can't be a TM because He can change His mind.
- CG counters with "not so, because good (morality) is in His nature".

My problem with AK's objection is his anthropomorphizing God. A transcendant God, IMO the only kind that can be reasonably envisioned, presumably wouldn't have human properties like mental state, changable or not. So there I agree with CG, who I think is arguing effectively that point.

But I see the issue of moral grounding as analogous to whether math is created by humans or is a universal truth only discovered by them. Independent of the answer, math "works" and no rational person would stop following the rules of math just because of disbelief that math is grounded in God. Similarly, I don't see that it matters whether morals are created by humans or constitute a universal truth created by God and only discovered by humans. In my experience, atheists don't reject the primary rules of morality (don't murder, steal, rape, etc) just because they don't believe them to be grounded in God. It's sufficient that the rules "work"- in the sense of making a modern society livable - whatever their source. Furthermore, even if one accepts that the rules are created by God, what is the mechanism by which they are "discovered" by humans? This too would seem to require some type of anthropomorphic god for which there appears to be no credible evidence. Hence, I see no practical need for CG's TM.

Which is why I personally resist the label "atheist" in either it's weak (don't believe exists) or strong (believe doesn't exist) form. For me, God's existence is simply irrelevant - except in the realm of human psychology where God obviously does (more accurately, gods do) exist, though only conceptually.

The utilitarian view seems to resolve the question of how in the absence of belief in God one justifies the "unique human dignity" supposedly requisite to respecting human rights: one doesn't (at least this one doesn't). You can think respect for human rights makes for a better society despite thinking that humans are a pretty pathetic lot, not only not loved by God but perhaps even despised by Him - in which case, it's not His love but His indifference that saves us.

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 5:01 AM

M: "Do you agree that although the statement "Elizabeth II is the present Queen of England" is meaningful for the reasons Kripke described, it is also not true in all possible worlds?"

"Elizabeth II is the present queen of England" is contingent, I think, but that's because "the present queen of England" isn't a name. If you don't like fictional examples, consider Hesperus & Phosphorus, or Brutus and Yates, or Deep Throat and Felt.

Mathematical examples don't correspond as closely to what I'm talking about here, but they can very clearly be informative but still necessary: we were informed, for instance, that Fermat's Last Theorem was true.

"If so, can you try and present a reasoned argument for why the entity we would label 'God' has a good nature in all possible worlds?"

Explaining why I think God has all the attributes I think he does would be a long, complicated story. But I generally use things like the Westminster Catechisms as a go-by. There's a long tradition that says God is necessarily good. My argument here is not to try to show that that tradition should be, on its own, compelling to the unbeliever, but to compare this story with the materialist's story on a very limited question--the existence of truthmakers for moral claims.

"[Y]ou write that God is an ontological ground, or truthmaker, in your system, but then you seem very clearly to have other criterion for assessing goodness than God's nature..."

Yes; I'll reiterate: "we can grasp the meaning of 'good' independently of our grasp of the meaning of 'God.'" That means having something like a means of assessing what is or isn't good.

But we need to distinguish a criterion for assessing moral claims, or goodness, from their ontological ground. That's what my last paragraph was trying to get at. We have criteria for assessing waterhood besides counting the number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms per molecule, but that's still water's nature.

"[W]hat do we conceive the nature of moral obligation to be?"

Here's one quick take on it: I think moral obligations are objectively-existing conclusive reason for action. So in looking for an ontological ground for them, we need to look for a being or an entity that by its nature supplies conclusive reasons for action. Seems to me that God could do the trick.

# posted by

Chris : 8:29 AM

Charles: "[recapitulating my argument:] Morals must be universally true. Thus, they require 'truthmakers' (TM)."

I think contingent propositions (e.g., "CTW is a human being, not a machine") need truthmakers too. Moral claims need necessary truthmakers because they're necessarily true.

"Theists have a candidate TM: 'God'; atheists have none."

I'm actually comparing theism with materialism, not just any form of atheism.

"Furthermore, even if one accepts that the rules are created by God, what is the mechanism by which they are 'discovered' by humans?"

I'd say, the individual human conscience; see Romans 2:14-15.

"This too would seem to require some type of anthropomorphic god for which there appears to be no credible evidence."

All depends on what evidence you regard as credible, of course.

# posted by

Chris : 8:39 AM

Chris --

Would the ontological/ethical link perhaps be a bit clearer if you explained it the way Scotus/J. Hare does? That is, that God, if he chose to create creatures, had to create creatures whose end was union with him, and so morality stems from God's nature because it is a route towards that union? Or does that have problems I'm not seeing?

# posted by

Mad Jurist : 10:20 AM

Mad Jurist: that might help, and seems to make sense to me; I haven't read these discussions, though I do think John Hare's generally a very sensible fellow. The review here makes Hare's view sound pretty plausible. In general, a lot more might be said about particular characteristics of the God who actually exists in order to explain why he inherently provides reasons for action in virtue of who he is. But I'm aiming here just to sketch a general argument.

# posted by

Chris : 10:46 AM

This argument is getting a little too up in the clouds for me. To make things more simple, I'll reiterate a point I've made before.

I understand the "need" for God to make certain moral truths non-negotiable. However what we think of as "human rights" -- from America's Founding to the modern era -- are not derived from the Bible or the traditional understanding of the Christian religion.

The Bible, unlike America's Declaration of Independence, nowhere speaks of a God-given right to revolt against tyranically government but intimates the opposite (see Romans 13). The Bible also nowhere grants unalienable rights to political liberty (i.e., a right to self-rule) or liberty of conscience (i.e., a right to worship as one pleases).

To America's Foundings and the Enlightenment philosophers they followed, these were the most elementary of God-given rights. And nowhere are they to be found in the Bible or the historical understanding of Christianity up until that time.

Likewise on slavery the Bible is insufficient in its claims; we could go on and on and on.

If you want to attach your human rights claim du jour to God like America's Founders and the philosopehrs of classical liberalism did, fine. But don't ignore the political/theological problem of importing inauthentically Christian ideas into your faith to give "credit" your creed with "rights" claims.

To "settle" the argument on gay marriage, I could just as easily assert that God made gays qua gays, and therefore wants to see them married.

This similar to what our Founders and the theologians they followed did when they attempted to explain away Romans 13 to justify revolt against government.

# posted by

Jonathan Rowe : 10:57 AM

Would the ontological/ethical link perhaps be a bit clearer if you explained it the way Scotus/J. Hare does? That is, that God, if he chose to create creatures, had to create creatures whose end was union with him, and so morality stems from God's nature because it is a route towards that union? Or does that have problems I'm not seeing?

Once again, these arguments seem to stretch the notion of "possible" beyond all recognition. Why does an omniscient and omnipotent being "have" to do anything? Why is it meaningful to speak as if it is constrained?

# posted by

Unknown : 11:19 AM

Explaining why I think God has all the attributes I think he does would be a long, complicated story. But I generally use things like the Westminster Catechisms as a go-by. There's a long tradition that says God is necessarily good. My argument here is not to try to show that that tradition should be, on its own, compelling to the unbeliever, but to compare this story with the materialist's story on a very limited question--the existence of truthmakers for moral claims.

Well, this does seem to limit our discussion significantly. This notion that God has necessary properties seems enormously important to your argument, and it seems very unlikely to me. It would really help if you would try to suggest why it my be the case.

To return to my prior example, you admitted that "Elizabeth II is the present Queen of England" is a contingent sentence. Well, why is "God is good" any different? Both identify both an entity, and a characteristic we believe that entity has in our world. Absent statements that are analytically true (it is very hard to imagine a world where "if Annie is taller than Betty, then Betty is shorter than Annie" would be false), it is very hard for me to understand why you would claim that it is impossible for any being to have a certain characteristic in another possible world.

# posted by

Unknown : 11:27 AM

But we need to distinguish a criterion for assessing moral claims, or goodness, from their ontological ground. That's what my last paragraph was trying to get at. We have criteria for assessing waterhood besides counting the number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms per molecule, but that's still water's nature.

I agree that we need to distinguish moral epistemics from moral ontology. But the point is this: if we assume omniscience in a decisionmaker, then it should be the case that the decision procedure for assessing the truth of a proposition corresponds in all cases to examining that propositions truthmaker and determining whether that truthmaker adequately corresponds with the proposition. So an "idealized epistemic investigation" should tell us a great deal about a claim's underlying ontology.

You seem to admit that, if you were omniscient, and you were to discover that God's nature is in some respects evil (by reference I suppose to some intuitional or reasoned basis for assessing morality) you would revise your estimate of God's goodness, not of what goodness means. But that seems necessarily to make your truthmaker something other than God.

Can you help me out here? I'm really interested in understanding your position, but I keep butting my head up against this wall.

It seems like you are confusing the concept of an ontological ground with a different concept. The concept you seem to be seeking for morality is "what can I tie this to that seems very stable, to the extent of being unchanging in all possible worlds." But an ontological ground does not need to have such stability. The ontological ground of "it is raining today" is the weather, even though it might have been different. Maybe you are seeking to have one concept do two different forms of work, which may not be compatible in your system.

So, it would seem that you might be able to consistently say:

1. Moral claims are grounded in a universal moral law, to which I have intuitional access, as do all other living humans. Because of this intuitional access, our history and traditions help elaborate the content of this law to some degree.

2. The true moral law happens, in this world, to correspond perfectly with God's nature. As we better understand this nature, we learn that all of our intuitions about the moral law can be perfectly articulated by a reference to that nature.

3. I beliveve that, in this universe, God's nature does not change. It is permanently stable, and I view this property as valuable in avoiding having our moral truths change from place to place and time to time.

# posted by

Unknown : 11:44 AM

Here's one quick take on it: I think moral obligations are objectively-existing conclusive reason for action. So in looking for an ontological ground for them, we need to look for a being or an entity that by its nature supplies conclusive reasons for action. Seems to me that God could do the trick.

Hmmm...seems problemmatic on two different levels.

1. If you hold a gun to my child's head, I might very well view that as an "objectively-existing, conclusive reason" for doing almost whatever you say. But that doesn't make such actions necessarily moral; it just means that I find it impossible to override the reason for action that you have created.

2. I think the tie to God's nature still suffers from the Humean problem Prof. Koppelman identified. Why should we say that God's nature or will give us conclusive reason to do anything? What unique property of God gives him this status? If it is his "goodness," then we should take seriously the notion that it is "goodness," and not God, that provides the conclusive reasons for action.

Any thoughts? Also, it would help me if you would unpack your term a bit. Can you describe what you think it means for something to exist "objectively" -- do you just mean that it is not mind-dependent? Do you mean it does not vary situationally? Also, I worry that the concept of a "reason" is insufficiently developed here. My hunger may be a reason for me to order a steak. I also think it exists objectively -- it is a fact about the world at a certain time. If it is strong enough, it might be conclusive of my decision. But none of this seems very much like morality, right?

# posted by

Unknown : 11:51 AM

“Why does an omniscient and omnipotent being ‘have’ to do anything? Why is it meaningful to speak as if it is constrained?... This notion that God has necessary properties seems enormously important to your argument, and it seems very unlikely to me. It would really help if you would try to suggest why it m[a]y be the case.”

I agree that God’s necessity and the fact that, on the theist’s picture, God is constrained by his nature, are very important to my argument. This is certainly worth a lot more careful consideration. But in terms of an evaluation of this argument, “maybe God is contingent, or maybe God is bad in some possible worlds” is on a par with the suggestion “maybe God doesn’t exist.” A contingent God, or a God who is bad in some possible worlds, wouldn’t do the job of supplying a truthmaker for necessary moral claims, but a necessary, necessarily-good God might. That itself is one reason to think that God is necessary and constrained by his nature.

I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but I’m told that Plantinga’s Does God Have a Nature? is a very good explanation of God’s necessity and how he is constrained by his nature.

“Absent statements that are analytically true … it is very hard for me to understand why you would claim that it is impossible for any being to have a certain characteristic in another possible world.”

It is pretty uncontroversial among philosophers, I think, that statements like “Hesperus is Phosphorus” are true in all worlds where Hesperus exists. The notion of “contingent identity” is confined to only a few people like Gibbard or Lewis. See, e.g., Rea’s The Problem of Material Constitution—contingent identity would make lots of problems go away, but it is sufficiently unattractive that relatively few people embrace it.

“You seem to admit that, if you were omniscient, and you were to discover that God's nature is in some respects evil (by reference I suppose to some intuitional or reasoned basis for assessing morality) you would revise your estimate of God's goodness, not of what goodness means. But that seems necessarily to make your truthmaker something other than God.”

No, I don’t think it does. We can run the same hypothetical with other a posteriori necessities. Think of Hesperus and Phosphorus. Suppose I were to learn that Venus actually doesn’t appear in the evening, but only in the morning; it turns out that aliens use a sophisticated cloaking device, so that when we look up and see what we thought was “the evening star,” we’re actually looking at an object that the aliens put up between Venus and us. Now, in the real world, when I say “the mass of the evening star is x,” the truthmaker for that claim is Hesperus/Phosphorus/Venus. But were I to find out that the crazy alien cloaking-device story is true, I would change my mind about what it is that is the truthmaker for statements about the evening star—statements like “the mass of the evening star is x” would turn out to be true in virtue of the mass of the alien-placed object, not Venus. But in the actual world we live in, where we haven’t discovered that the crazy alien story is true, the truthmaker for claims about Hesperus is Venus/Phosphorus. Likewise, in the actual world we live in, where we haven’t
that God requires outrageous things—of course, I’m presupposing an answer to the problem of evil—the mere hypothetical of discovering those sorts of things shouldn't make us think the truthmaker for claims about goodness isn't God's nature.

“[A]n ontological ground does not need to have such stability. The ontological ground of ‘it is raining today’ is the weather, even though it might have been different.”

Right. The ontological ground for contingent truths can be contingent. But the ontological ground for necessary truths, like moral ones, has to be necessary.

“[I]n this universe, God's nature does not change. It is permanently stable, and I view this property as valuable in avoiding having our moral truths change from place to place and time to time.”

The truthmaker for moral claims has to be more than permanent, applying at all times. It has to be necessary, so that moral claims will still apply in very different possible worlds—not just very far-away parts of this world, but worlds where there are aliens and violinist-inspired kidnappings and such.

"Why should we say that God's nature or will give us conclusive reason to do anything? What unique property of God gives him this status?"

Here’s one way to think about it. No one will doubt, I think, that our moral faculties—our consciences—are, in fact, capable of grasping basic reasons for action and moral properties like good and bad and right and wrong. On the theistic picture, God is ultimately responsible for the existence of those faculties. And God intends that those faculties will grasp him as the highest good. When presented with sufficient information about God, people will echo Psalm 73 and say, “there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.” The theistic story is that those who know everything about God respond that way; those who respond otherwise are mistaken in some way.

Suppose we were to meet an all-powerful, all-knowing being whose requirements matched up amazingly well with our intuitions about what ought to be the case, and this being told us that those intuitions were the result of a basic faculty of moral judgment that he made sure human beings possessed. I think it would make a lot of sense, were that to happen, to conclude that our moral intuitions did indeed point back to this being as the ground for their truth.

Dialectically, I don’t imagine this sort of gesture at an explanation will be compelling. But my point is just this: the theist has a proper sort of candidate for the highest good, but the materialist doesn’t. Showing the adequacy of that candidate requires demonstrating how compelling this being is, given all of the many actual details of what he commands.

"Can you describe what you think it means for something to exist 'objectively' ...?"

I mean to distinguish reasons for action from mere psychological causes of actions, which the gun-to-the-head and hunger examples seems to involve. But I'm not sure what this sort of issue has to do with whether moral requirements need an ontological ground, so I don't think I'll speculate any more on this issue for now.

# posted by

Chris : 5:21 PM

A contingent God, or a God who is bad in some possible worlds, wouldn’t do the job of supplying a truthmaker for necessary moral claims, but a necessary, necessarily-good God might. That itself is one reason to think that God is necessary and constrained by his nature.

Well, that seems awfully like trying to adjust the data in order to reach a conclusion you desire. Perhaps part of the problem is that you are taking it as a given that moral facts exist, and then trying to figure out how the world must be in order to make that the case.

Since you seem reluctant to offer even a cursory explanation on this point, I'll leave it alone. I will note, however, that your Venus example is missing the point I was trying to make. You keep retreating to examples of multiple names for the same object, and contending that this answers my request for an example of an object that must have a certain property in all possible worlds. But there is certainly a difference between names and qualities. If Bob is tall in some worlds, he might be short in others. If Venus is the 2nd planet in some universes, it might well be the fourth planet in others (in which aliens are deceiving us). Descate's evil demon seems to suggest that no fact about this universe must exist in all possible worlds, because it is possible (though not probable) for us to be mistaken about literally any fact in the universe.

So I repeat that I think it would help your credibility on this point to give even one example of an object that must exist in all possible universes, and must have a certain quality in all those universes. Because it seems that if God is the only such entity you can imagine, and you can't really offer even a sketch of an explanation for why he might be different in this respect, all claims contingent on such a foundation must be regarded with some skepticism.

The truthmaker for moral claims has to be more than permanent, applying at all times. It has to be necessary, so that moral claims will still apply in very different possible worlds—not just very far-away parts of this world, but worlds where there are aliens and violinist-inspired kidnappings and such.

I understand that. I was trying to suggest that perhaps God's nature is a sort of second best; an objectively stable property in this universe, with more constancy than human nature or reflection. If you need moral facts to be true in all possible universes, than this could be ontologically grounded in some universal moral law, which God's nature (in this universe) happens to perfectly reflect. So God's nature becomes an epistemic, rather than an ontologic, ground of morality. This might more consistently reflect your intuitions that God's nature is good, that that good nature helps to give stability to moral discourse, but that we can imagine God being bad and the moral law not changing in response.

I mean to distinguish reasons for action from mere psychological causes of actions, which the gun-to-the-head and hunger examples seems to involve. But I'm not sure what this sort of issue has to do with whether moral requirements need an ontological ground, so I don't think I'll speculate any more on this issue for now.

Well, I'm not sure I agree; the gun to the head would certainly be the reason I do something, as well as the cause. I understand that this line might be digressive; I do think, however, that our hazy conception of what might be an ontologic ground of moral propositions flows from our equally hazy concept of what it means for some actions to be morally obligatory and other actions not to be, or to be morally proscribed. Certainly such concepts are much harder to analyze than legal obligations, which have puzzled plenty of people themselves.

# posted by

Unknown : 6:04 PM

"Perhaps part of the problem is that you are taking it as a given that moral facts exist, and then trying to figure out how the world must be in order to make that the case."

Exactly! I'm assuming that moral claims can be true, and reasoning on that basis. We can either abandon the premise, accept the conclusion, or find a problem in the reasoning.

"You keep retreating to examples of multiple names for the same object, and contending that this answers my request for an example of an object that must have a certain property in all possible worlds."

That's not what I'm trying to use the multiple-names example to show. I'm using those to show that an entity can have essential characteristics--characteristics true of the entity in all the possible worlds in which it exists--even though it is conceivable that we could find out that the entity did not have the characteristic. Alternatively, I'm using the example to show how we can have a grasp of the concept of A independent of the concept of B, even though B is the underlying nature and ontological ground of A. I haven't understood you to be asking for another example of something that exists necessarily--Venus obviously doesn't exist necessarily.

"[I]t would help your credibility on this point to give even one example of an object that must exist in all possible universes, and must have a certain quality in all those universes."

I think numbers, propositions, properties, and sets all exist necessarily. But I didn't understand that you were asking for that sort of example before.

"If you need moral facts to be true in all possible universes, than this could be ontologically grounded in some universal moral law, which God's nature (in this universe) happens to perfectly reflect."

Well, it could, but that wouldn't be materialism. My argument is trying to suggest an ontological advantage for theism over materialism, not just any form of atheism.

# posted by

Chris : 6:50 PM

Just a quick though (with more responses later):

Do you agree that it is necessary for your argument, not only that God be good in all possible worlds in which he exists, but also that God necessarily exist in all possible worlds? I think that is an obvious assumption you make, because if God did not exist in some universe, than his nature could not serve as the sort of necessary, universal ground you are searching for.

If so, I'm not sure you have gained a great deal of certainty. Now it is not enough for us to be confident both that God exists, and is good, in this universe (which is already hard enough); now we have to be very confident that it is impossible, in any world that could exist, for these facts not to be the case. I'd submit that such a premise is both necessary to your argument, and extraordinarily challenging to demonstrate. Much harder than the normal leaps of faith believers are expected to make. As a result, such a method of reasoning seems no better as a ground of morality than a strong conviction in a non-materialist atheist that the moral law exists in every possible universe, and that we have intuitional access to it in some mystical manner.

Thoughts?

# posted by

Unknown : 6:58 PM

Me: "[I]t would help your credibility on this point to give even one example of an object that must exist in all possible universes, and must have a certain quality in all those universes."

Chris: I think numbers, propositions, properties, and sets all exist necessarily. But I didn't understand that you were asking for that sort of example before.

I said objects, Chris. Or entities if you like.

Although I doubt that concept of number, sets, etc. would meaningfully exist in a universe that was itself an empty set, devoid of all content. But that is entirely off the point, of course.

# posted by

Unknown : 7:03 PM

This argument is based, among other things, on the assumption that moral truths are necessary rather than contingent. Why is this obviously true? It seems obviously false to me, at least for many moral truths, even "universalistic" moral truths. For example, I would say that "consensual gay sex is, ceteris paribus, morally permissible" is true, but not necessarily true. For example, gay sex would be generally wrongful if it really would lead to the destruction of society. Similarly, I find it difficult to believe that slavery is always wrongful in the possible worlds in which human psychology is such that enslavement to others provides the highest possible degree of human happiness and fulfillment. The materialist, then, can say (though I'm not sure I would personally say) that the truthmakers for moral claims about slavery and gay sex are the contingent facts about slavery and gay sex (e.g., being enslaved doesn't make people happy, gay sex doesn't destroy society).

So does Koppleman means by "moral truth" something that excludes claims like "slavery is always wrongful"? Or does he claim that the wrongfulness of slavery, and the rightfulness or wrongfulness of gay sex, are independent of contingent facts about human biology, pyschology, economics, and so on?

# posted by

Unknown : 8:51 PM

Elliot: I don't think anyone is claiming that all moral propositions would be necessarily true or false. I think, rather, the claim is that some foundational moral truths would be necessary. Thus, all of your examples seem to presuppose some sort of utilitarian calculus, wherein we decide whether slavery is wrong by assessing the harm that it causes. The harder question is whether the deeper moral claim, that it is wrong to cause an increase in aggregate suffering or a decrease in aggregate pleasure, is a contingent truth that might not be the case in another possible world.

# posted by

Unknown : 11:13 PM

I am struck by the strength of your claim for the term "truth". You seem to think it exists in a realm accessible to humans, but objectified in the nature of God. I cannot make sense of this.

I'm a practicing lawyer, and I know what I mean by truth; it means something I can prove in a court, using witnesses and documents, all in accordance with a set of rules. We all agree that this is enough, and we live with the results. The generalization of this to ordinary life produces a completely different definition for truth; it means merely a proposition on which we are willing to take action. The only test is its effect in the real world.

I won't make a lot of claims about this definition. It isn't grand, it doesn't lend itself to theological arguments and it doesn't magnify the place of the human in the grand scheme of things. What it does do is avoid claims about the nature of the almighty as a source of morality, and places the burden of creating morals squarely where it belongs: on us humans. I trace my thinking to Protagoras, you to Plato, so I leave you with this:

"Man is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, of things that are not, that they are not."

# posted by

masaccio : 11:35 PM

The obvious problem with this approach is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the god on which you wish you found your moral views exists. And if he did, there is no way to ascertain what his moral views are.

This entire line of discussion is a sham.

# posted by

The Fool : 9:34 AM

M: "[I]t is necessary for your argument, not only that God be good in all possible worlds in which he exists, but also that God necessarily exist in all possible worlds? I think that is an obvious assumption you make."

That's right. Sorry that wasn't clearer from the outset.

For modal logic fans out there, I'm using an intuitive modality at least as strong as S4, so what's necessary is necessarily necessary.

M: "I'd submit that such a premise is both necessary to your argument, and extraordinarily challenging to demonstrate."

CMarshall4: "[T]here is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the god on which you wish you found your moral views exists."

But I'm not using the necessity of God as a premise. I'm only using the truth of moral claims as a premise. My conclusion is only that theism of a traditional stripe has ontological advantages over materialism. I'm just setting out the two views side by side, with the necessity of God as a component of the particular sort of theism I'm considering, and asking which does a better job on this one score--providing a truthmaker for moral claims.

"[S]uch a method of reasoning seems no better as a ground of morality than a strong conviction in a non-materialist atheist that the moral law exists in every possible universe, and that we have intuitional access to it in some mystical manner."

My target, though, is materialism. The nature of our "intuitional access" to something immaterial might pose trouble; why would our moral faculties be in touch with something immaterial, outside time and space? On theism, on the other hand, it's relatively easy to see how we get moral knowledge.

(Of course, you could go this way: there is a contingently-existing God-like being in this world, telling us about the necessarily-existent moral law, and though that law exists in the God-like-being-less possible worlds, knowledge of it doesn't; morality exists in all possible worlds, but not moral knowledge. But that view seems pretty weird.)

"...one example of an object that must exist in all possible universes..."

For what it's worth--not much!--I think numbers are mathematical objects. But I'll admit, God's pretty unique.

Here's one way to think about why God, if he exists at all, has to exist in all possible worlds. Suppose he only exists in some worlds. Now, imagine God in one of those worlds. He thinks, "It's great to exist. Thank goodness I'm in one of these worlds where I exist!" It seems very strange to think of God having to be either just lucky that he's in one of the worlds where he exists, or else dependent on some other being deciding that we're in that world rather than one of the no-God worlds. God isn't supposed to be like that; he's supposed to be sovereign and self-existent. That's just my intuitive take, though.

CMarshall4: "And if he [God] did [exist], there is no way to ascertain what his moral views are."

Our individual moral consciences, intended by God to reflect moral reality, are one way to do it, I think.

Elliot: "This argument is based, among other things, on the assumption that moral truths are necessary rather than contingent. ...[T]his ... seems obviously false to me."

Even in the case of particular moral judgments about our world, there is a necessary moral claim in the neighborhood, e.g., "In all worlds where X is true, same-sex relationships are morally permitted," or "In all possible worlds, it is morally proper to promote pleasure and the survival of society." Those are the sort of moral claim that could be tested by hypothetical counterexamples.

# posted by

Chris : 10:46 AM

As was no doubt clear from my earlier comment, moral philosophy is not an area in which I have any formal background; in particular, I don't know the lingo. But as I have read the intervening comments and consulted wikipedia, I think I'm getting a little of it down.

Subject to that caveat, I think I can now construct a response (for better or worse) to your replies.

"Moral claims need necessary truthmakers because they're necessarily true."

First, to better see if I get your point, I'd like to restate this using my understanding of the generally accepted terminology, which you can correct if I still don't get it:

For a moral proposition to be deemed necessary there must exist a truthmaker, ie, an absolute moral authority that can guarantee its truth.

Logically, this seems correct, almost a tautology. But as other commenters have observed, it appears that in your argument the premise is assumed. But if one rejects the premise (as I do), the conclusion of course fails. I think this where a lot of non-theists* stumble. It's painful to think that something that seems to any reasonable person unequivocally and horrifyingly "evil" is in fact morally contingent, but if one rejects the existence of an absolute moral authority, c'est la logos.

"I'm actually comparing theism with materialism, not just any form of atheism."

If materialism is akin to mind-body dualism (see footnote below), I don't see why you claim (as I understand your reply) that materialists constitute a subset of atheists. I don't see why one who rejects dualism can't believe anything they like since it seems to me that such rejection addresses process, not content. If this isn't at all close to your concept of "materialism", I have no idea what beliefs your concept entails.

CW: What is the mechanism by which [necessary moral propositions] are 'discovered' by humans?"
CG: I'd say, the individual human conscience.

Psychology and cognitive science are probably even more disjoint from my knowledge base than moral philosophy, but what little understanding I have of them suggests to me that human conscience is likely to be a communication channel between God and humans that is even less reliable than the "written word of God".

"depends on what evidence you regard as credible, of course"

Of course - which IMO is the crux of the disconnect between even the rational theist and the a-theist (ie, soft atheist).

- Charles

* I don't understand why you focus on "materialism". My reading of the wikipedia entry suggests that it's an ill-defined, unpopular, and seemingly pretty unsophisticated position. One of the described interpretations, rejection of mind-body dualism, I more-or-less understand and am inclined toward; but others seem to be naive at best. Eg, even the "existence" of matter seems a pretty fuzzy concept post Einstein and quantum physics.

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 1:23 PM

Even in the case of particular moral judgments about our world, there is a necessary moral claim in the neighborhood, e.g., "In all worlds where X is true, same-sex relationships are morally permitted," or "In all possible worlds, it is morally proper to promote pleasure and the survival of society." Those are the sort of moral claim that could be tested by hypothetical counterexamples.

I'm actually unconvinced that there are any such claims, where I understand "claims" to mean sentences of natural language, not arbitrary relations. Why should we believe that it is possible to express every morally relevant fact in a sentence? One could do it circularly--"Murder is necessarily wrong" is true only because the notion of murder has wrongness is built in--but that's not what I'm talking about.

Nor do I see anything interesting about arbitrary relations (such as the function from possible worlds to the truth-value of some proposition about gay sex in that world).

Also, the set of all possible worlds is at least as large as the real numbers, while the set of all natural-language sentences is merely countably large.

# posted by

Unknown : 1:40 PM

"It’s just God’s nature, as the Shorter Catechism puts it, is to be 'infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'"

But that says absolutely nothing useful about whether (S)he is "moral" or anything of any practical consequence. It's at best tautological. Let's say She says that pi is three. That may be "wisdom", but it's wrong, and ultimately unhelpful.

Even if you think that some beliefs are going to help you out in the "next life" (even as you struggle through your mortal days believing the sun circles the earth), you're going to have a hell of a time trying to satisfy all the other potential Gawds, such as Ba'al, Cthulhu, etc., simultaneously, to cover all the numbers on Pascal's roulette wheel....

Cheers,

# posted by

Arne Langsetmo : 1:44 PM

ctw - what is meant by "materialism" is indeed pretty unclear. Philosophers these days generally talk about "physicalism", which allows non-material things like gravitational fields to exist without committing one to a position on the existence of gravitrons. It having been some years since undergrad, I wouldn't feel comfortable describing exactly what physicalism is supposed to be though.

On the other hand, when non-philosophers talk about "materialism", they generally mean the position that there are no gods or souls, considering them the only possible candidates for non-material things. (I personally think this is silly; I don't think silences, rainbows, corporations, or laws are material, but I have no problem attesting to their existence.)

# posted by

Unknown : 2:07 PM

Me: "Even in the case of particular moral judgments about our world, there is a necessary moral claim in the neighborhood."

Elliot: "I'm actually unconvinced that there are any such claims."

Thinking about this a little bit more, it occurs to me that if we index our worlds, then moral claims end up being necessary again. If alpha is our actual world, then "In alpha, gay marriage is morally permissible" is true necessarily if true at all. I think we might need S5 to make that work, but that's fine with me. So I don't think moral particularism is a way around my argument.

"Why should we believe that it is possible to express every morally relevant fact in a sentence?"

I'm not sure how I'm committed to thinking that.

"Also, the set of all possible worlds is at least as large as the real numbers, while the set of all natural-language sentences is merely countably large."

Yea and amen. But why does that matter?

# posted by

Chris : 2:12 PM

Thinking about this a little bit more, it occurs to me that if we index our worlds, then moral claims end up being necessary again. If alpha is our actual world, then "In alpha, gay marriage is morally permissible" is true necessarily if true at all. I think we might need S5 to make that work, but that's fine with me. So I don't think moral particularism is a way around my argument.

This seems more like playing games with modal logic than establishing something substantive. (Why does believing in human rights require belief in this highly specific type of purportedly necessary claim?) And its truthmakers are back to being the facts about alpha, leaving no necessity for God.

As for the size of the set of possible worlds, it suggests (but does not prove) that there are not generally sentences (and thus not claims, rather than arbitrary relations not specifiable in any language) capable of capturing all of the morally relevant differences between possible worlds that would be necessary to make necessary claims about morality in all worlds.

# posted by

Unknown : 2:36 PM

Elliot: I'll have to think some more about moral particularism. But it seems that we could still just include mitigating circumstances in some sort of ceteris paribus clause. The particularist still thinks that something like "If there are no mitigating circumstances, then killing a person is wrong" is necessary, though determining whether a mitigating circumstance exists might be really hard to do.

# posted by

Chris : 3:03 PM

Charles: "If materialism is akin to mind-body dualism ... I don't see why you claim (as I understand your reply) that materialists constitute a subset of atheists."

The Wikipedia definition of materialism doesn't seem too bad to me: "materialism ... holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter..." If God isn't material, then materialists have to be atheists.

We need to distinguish a general materialism about everything from materialism in the philosophy of mind. Lots of philosophy-of-mind materialists (e.g., Peter van Inwagen, Trenton Merricks) are theists.

I suppose I could have used "physicalism" just as easily, but it's a much less common term. (5.85M v. 333K). I don't think adding things like holes or waves (or corporations!) to our ontology is very much like adding a moral law or God, though.

# posted by

Chris : 6:24 PM

Okay, Chris. I think that relatively few people these days who think carefully about it are materialists in the strong sense you seem to be eager to differentiate yourself from. And I think that is true of atheists as well as theists. Based on my anecdotal experience, most atheists are moral realists, committed to some form of non-physical moral truthmakers, if they really think about it. They may be fuzzy on the details, but I doubt they are much fuzzier than most theists would be on the details of your concept of the necessarily-exisiting God with a necessary nature.

So I think your argument works better as an additional demonstration of the fact that more permissive ontologies work better as a home for moral ontology than very restrictive ontologies such as a strong version of materialism. Which is not a massive news flash.

Also, as a sociological point, I wonder if the percentage of theists who would not be willing to commit to the proposition that God and his nature exist necessarily is higher than the percentage of atheists who espouse a strong enough materialism to make a necessarily-existing moral law impossible. Because I'd be wiling to bet that a large percentage of theists would scratch their heads if asked to offer a view on that subject, once they thought about it.

# posted by

Unknown : 11:47 PM

Earlier I said: You seem to admit that, if you were omniscient, and you were to discover that God's nature is in some respects evil (by reference I suppose to some intuitional or reasoned basis for assessing morality) you would revise your estimate of God's goodness, not of what goodness means. But that seems necessarily to make your truthmaker something other than God.

On further reflection, I still think you haven't responded adequately to this. I think it is coherent to ground a moral conception ontologically in the necessary nature of a particular being, but that still suffers the arbitrariness property I identified earlier: if (we hypothesize) the being in fact had a different necessary nature, then that should cause a correlative change in the truth of moral propositions. So, if we analyze the concept of moral truth to mean "the sort of thing that would be approved by a God with a necessary nature" then if we discovered that God's necessary nature caused him to approve of rape, then rape should become morally good.

In other words, the portion of your argument that hypothesizes that God is "necessarily good" is still skewered by Euthyphro. Either the statement is meaningless, or else you are still importing some other truthmaker for the concept of "goodness."

# posted by

Unknown : 10:30 AM

M: "[I]f we analyze the concept of moral truth to mean "the sort of thing that would be approved by a God with a necessary nature" then if we discovered that God's necessary nature caused him to approve of rape, then rape should become morally good."

But I don't think we should "analyze the concept of moral truth" in order to see how it refers to God's nature, just like I don't think we "analyze the concept of" Hesperus to see that its nature is the same as Phosphorus/Venus.

"[T]he portion of your argument that hypothesizes that God is 'necessarily good' is still skewered by Euthyphro. Either the statement is meaningless, or else you are still importing some other truthmaker for the concept of 'goodness.'"

No. I am importing some other basis for grasping the meaning of "good," but not some other truthmaker. These are not the same thing. Again, saying that Hesperus is Phosphorus, and that Phosophorus supplies the underlying truthmaker for statements about Hesperus, is not the same thing as saying that our basis for grasping whether something is Hesperus is the same as our basis for grasping whether something is Phosophorus. Our basis for grasping whether something is Hesperus is that it appears in the evening in a certain place in the sky; our basis for grasping whether something is Phosphorus is that it appears in the morning in a certain place in the sky.

We have a basis for grasping whether something is morally required--our consciences and moral faculties--independent of our consideration of God. Our basis for grasping whether something is moral is whether it fits with those faculties. On the other hand, our basis for grasping whether something fits with God's nature is whether it is properly related to the necessary characteristics of an all-powerful, all-knowing, self-existent being. These are as different as morning and evening. Notwithstanding that, the underlying nature of moral requirement can still be God's nature.

Also, we can run exactly the same Euthyphro argument with "the moral law" instead of God's nature. Moral claims are ontologically grounded in the necessarily-existent moral law? That means that if the moral law were to require rape, then rape would be morally required! Outrageous! Must have some other truthmaker.

# posted by

Chris : 11:21 AM

Yes, Chris, but goodness has to correspond with some referent, doesn't it? It is describing some thing or property, right? Well, if that property is "God's nature", then changing God changess goodness, and if it isn't, you have a separate truthmaker.

So answer me this: what could we change (at least hypothetically) that would change the nature of goodness? I think this is another way of asking what goodness describes. The only things that don't change by changing something are statements that are true only with reference to the rules of some axiomatic system (like math), where we can change the rules, but we can't make the statement "Under the system determined by Peano's axioms, 5*1=1" true, except by changing the definitions of words. I am unaware of any other way that a non-analytic statement can be perfectly resistant to even hypothetical change, but maybe you can enlighten me, if it is your argument that moral truths are incapable of even hypothetically being changed by an alteration of some other necessary facts.

# posted by

Unknown : 11:42 AM

"That means that if the moral law were to require rape, then rape would be morally required! Outrageous! Must have some other truthmaker."

Though reluctant to jump in where it's typically over my head, I can't resist in this instance because to me it's so obvious: the problem goes away if you in fact DON'T have some other truthmaker. Nonconsensual sex is outrageous to "us" for whatever reasons. If in some isolated society - nevermind other world - it isn't, why must we insist that it "should" be? Why must we play God vis-a-vis them on this issue when we don't seem to need Him in ours.

Now if that other society ceases to be isolated and threatens to violate our values, we may need to fight back - but in self defense, not as missionaries. Otherwise, what is the moral dictate that justifies imposing our morality on a society that doesn't impact us?

Implicit in the need for moral certainty is a fear with which I can't identify. I'd appreciate any insight into what it might be.

I might note that like calling abortion "murder", there's a little disingenuousness in calling the act in question "rape". In a society in which the act in question were a moral dictate, it presumably wouldn't evoke all, if any, of the emotions that it - and the label we attach thereto - does in ours.

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 11:53 AM

Moral claims are ontologically grounded in the necessarily-existent moral law? That means that if the moral law were to require rape, then rape would be morally required! Outrageous! Must have some other truthmaker.

I don't disagree with this. Indeed, as I have suggested before, I have a fair degree of skepticism towards moral realism, and so it does not cause me great distress to learn that few proposed ontological groundings for morality have all the properties that moral realists would like them to have (obligatory, non-arbitrary, necessarily true). My point is just to show that the ontological grounding you are advancing is not free from these defects, and so is not superior to non-theistic methods of grounding moral claims.

# posted by

Unknown : 11:57 AM

"Based on my anecdotal experience, most atheists are moral realists"

Ditto, although again I'm not crystal clear on the terminology. The few friends (all non-religious) with whom I've had a moral philosophy-like discussion espouse what I might call (since labels seem to be endemic here) utilitarian christianity (lower case intended - none are Christians in the usual sense): follow the golden rule because it maximizes the probability that those with whom you interact will as well.

"[Atheists] may be fuzzy on the details, but I doubt they are much fuzzier than most theists"

Ditto again. To assume that on average the non-religious have a weaker foundation for their beliefs than the religious is laughable. It appears ("Religious Literacy", eg) that the average (emphasize average, not the likes of those who hang out at places like Balkinization) "Christian" knows less than I do about basic Christianity - which is close to nothing - never mind theological subtleties of the sort being discussed here.

"the percentage of atheists who espouse a strong enough materialism to make a necessarily-existing moral law impossible" ...

... is, of course, roughly zero. Contrary to perhaps present impressions, I - and more importantly, my friends - are all well educated, though not in philosophy, and I feel confident none has ever heard of materialism in this sense, never mind espouse it. Or most other "isms" of that sort.

This reminds me of the sometimes near hysterical critiques by theological sophisticates of Dawkins et al for being theologically naive. But the intended audience for books by the "new atheists" isn't people like Prof Green - it's those among the religious literate who are as philosophically naive as I. To suggest that their arguments aren't sufficiently erudite is to completely misunderstand their objectives. It's like criticizing an author trying to point out the dangers of excessive credit card use for not discussing the latest thinking on Keynesian economics.

BTW, I mean none of this rant as an attack on Prof Green. I appreciate his post and comments - and others of a similar nature - because of the cheap and easy education they provide (eg, I now know that I have an interest in "philosophy of mind" - having read a little Searle et al - despite being unfamiliar with that specific label). I find these kinds of discussions fascinating, but they should be recognized for what they are - intellectual gymnastics having almost nothing to do with "real" people.

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 11:59 AM

M: "The only things that don't change by changing something are statements that are true only with reference to the rules of some axiomatic system... I am unaware of any other way that a non-analytic statement can be perfectly resistant to even hypothetical change, but maybe you can enlighten me, if it is your argument that moral truths are incapable of even hypothetically being changed by an alteration of some other necessary facts."

It is not controversial that entities have some essential properties—properties without which an entity could not exist; properties had by the entity in all worlds in which it exists. For instance, I could not be an alligator. If we hypothetically imagine me changing into an alligator, we are hypothetically imagining me not existing. Similarly for any human being—for instance, Robert Yates, presumed author of the Antifederalist Brutus essays. There is no possible world in which Yates is an alligator.

Now, the truthmaker for claims about Brutus is Robert Yates, the human being. But what if Yates were an alligator? Would we then say that the Brutus essays were written by an alligator? That would be outrageous! So should we conclude that Robert Yates is not the truthmaker for claims about Brutus? No. The hypothetical scenario in which Yates is changed into an alligator is a hypothetical scenario in which Yates—and Brutus—do not exist.

Now, I think that one essential property of God—a property without which he could not exist—is not commanding rape. If we hypothetically imagine God commanding rape, we are hypothetically imagining God not existing. So, given the view that God's nature is the grounding for moral obligation, what should we make of this hypothetical scenario? It is a hypothetical scenario in which God—and moral obligation—do not exist.

# posted by

Chris : 12:40 PM

Chris, I think you are confusing the concepts of plausibility and possibility. Certainly it is possible (if very unlikely) that the Anti-Federalist papers were in fact written by an entity that had the form of an alligator, and was raised among alligators, but happened to have the ability to telepathically fool people into believing it was a human being. To the extent that what "Brutus" is describing is "the author of the Anti-Federalist papers" rather than the historically situated person named Yates who wrote them in our own, actual universe, then plausibly on this usage Brutus could be an alligator.

Now, you can avoid this by making naming conventions very strict, such as by claiming that only an entity of substantial similarity to an existing entity can bear the same name, so that any entity in another universe, even if called the same thing and treated in a historically identical manner in that universe, is no longer properly referred to by that name. But then, I think you have to explain the following:

1. If I gave you the desire to rape in another, hypothetical universe, would that hypothetical Chris Green no longer by properly referred to by that name, even if I kept everything else constant about you and the universe?

2. If so, why can't we do the same thing with God.

If your answer is no, we can no longer call that entity "Chris Green," then I hope you realize that your claim that the entity called God necessarily exists in any possible universe, with that little alteration permitted becomes correspondingly much, much weaker.

# posted by

Unknown : 1:04 PM

Hi Chris,

I know you and "M" are in the middle of a long conversation, and I'm not sure if my post will rehash stuff yawl have already covered or not. But I'm still unclear on a couple of things.

1) In one of your posts, you mentioned that God exists necessarily, why is this so? If this claim were on shaky ground what would that do to the overall claim about morality? How important is the claim 'God exists necessarily' to the overall argument?

2) God is claimed to be necessarily good. By itself, I have no problem with this. However I'm still failing to see how it follows that morality is grounded, because it casts doubt on God's omnipotence, in which case it casts doubt on why God's nature should constrain me.

I understand that God can't do impossible things, like make 2+2=5 or 'create a rock so heavy God can't lift it.' But changing our outlook is something we can imagine happening. Even if we can't imagine becoming evil, we know that some people behave in a way that we can describe as evil. So it just doesn't seem like changing your morality is an impossible thing, especially for God, since there would be no way to understand good outside of God. This makes me wonder about the traditional description of God as omnipotent. If God is omnipotent, then it seems like God can't be constrained by his/her/it's inherent nature. If it's only highly unlikely that God would change God's nature, but possible, then it seems to reintroduce the Euthyphro Dilemma.

If God's omnipotence isn't damaged, why not? If it is, what does this do about the grounding of morality?

3) Presumably we have free will, so why does God's necessary nature constrain us? Even if we posit a really powerful creator who can't change his/her/it's own goodness, presumably I can choose evil, so what's the problem for me? Surely it isn't that punishment awaits me right? Because that would reduce to "might makes right."

I'm not sure how all the claims fit together, and so I'm not sure if they're all necessary to the argument, so maybe you can clear them all up for me...thanks.

Jay

# posted by

Jay J : 2:42 PM

Me: "[W]e can run exactly the same Euthyphro argument with ‘the moral law’ instead of God's nature."
M: "I don't disagree with this. … My point is just to show that the ontological grounding you are advancing is not free from these defects, and so is not superior to non-theistic methods of grounding moral claims."

But my point--similar to my point in the main post, responding to Koppelman--is that the Euthyphro objection is really an objection that applies to any foundation for moral obligation. If we think that, in principle, it is possible to have an ontological foundation for moral claims, then the Euthyphro objection shouldn’t stop us from seeing God as the foundation.

I’ll agree that the God-grounds-moral-obligation view isn’t better at handling the Euthyphro problem than is, say, the moral law. But I never suggested it was. I just think that the Euthyphro problem isn’t fatal to the view. And here, at 11:57. you seem to agree. But then you seem to return to the objection at 1:04.

"Chris, I think you are confusing the concepts of plausibility and possibility."

I don't see how I'm doing that at all, and can’t see your point here. Are you suggesting that I, or Yates, could be an alligator? Very few people would agree, I think. But even if so, just change the example so it's even more extreme: certainly Yates and I couldn't be electrons. All you need to do to understand God having an essence is to understand that there are some properties without which an entity will cease to be that entity. On the traditional theistic picture, God has some of those sorts of properties.

The existence of essential properties is really not controversial at all. Moreover, in order just to understand what an essential property is, you don’t even have to agree that Yates and I couldn’t be electrons; you only have to understand what that view would mean.

"If I gave you the desire to rape in another, hypothetical universe..."

I'm not, alas, essentially good--not even all-good in the actual world!--so that could still be me.

"[W]hy can't we do the same thing with God[?]"

You can't do the same thing with God, on the traditional theistic story, because God is essentially good. Why think that? One reason why is that that way, we have a truthmaker for moral claims. It's the same reason we'd say that a moral law has its content essentially. Of course, if you just wanted to construct a view, different from traditional theism--for the purposes of criticizing it, perhaps--then one thing you could do in constructing that view would to make God inessentially good. Nothing stopping you.

Again, remember the dialectical setup of my argument: we first set out traditional theism and competing views; second, we see whether one view has ontological advantages over the others. The way I'm setting out traditional theism, God is essentially good and self-existent. It's fine to say we don't have reasons to think that, but I'm just assessing the ontological consequences of these particular views.

So the Euthyphro objection seems to boil down to this: if God isn't essentially good, then he can't serve as the foundation for moral obligation. Well, yes. But if he is, he can.

# posted by

Chris : 2:42 PM

Hi, Jay, glad to have you back.

"In one of your posts, you mentioned that God exists necessarily, why is this so?"

Here's my 5:21 above on why I include a necessarily-existing God in my picture of theism: "[I]n terms of an evaluation of this argument, 'maybe God is contingent, or maybe God is bad in some possible worlds' is on a par with the suggestion 'maybe God doesn’t exist.' A contingent God, or a God who is bad in some possible worlds, wouldn’t do the job of supplying a truthmaker for necessary moral claims, but a necessary, necessarily-good God might. That itself is one reason to think that God is necessary and constrained by his nature."

Here's my 10:46 above for a brief intuitive explanation why it'd be weird for God to be just contingent: "Here's one way to think about why God, if he exists at all, has to exist in all possible worlds. Suppose he only exists in some worlds. Now, imagine God in one of those worlds. He thinks, 'It's great to exist. Thank goodness I'm in one of these worlds where I exist!' It seems very strange to think of God having to be either just lucky that he's in one of the worlds where he exists, or else dependent on some other being deciding that we're in that world rather than one of the no-God worlds. God isn't supposed to be like that; he's supposed to be sovereign and self-existent. That's just my intuitive take, though."

"If this claim were on shaky ground what would that do to the overall claim about morality?"

It depends what you mean by "shaky ground." If you mean that we don't really have any reason to think it's true, that doesn't do anything to the propriety of my including the proposition in my picture of theism for the purpose of assessing its ontological virtues. But if you mean that we have reason to think that it's false, then you'd have that much reason to think that theism as I paint it wouldn't be true. It still wouldn't much affect my argument that the view has ontological advantages over materialism, though; it would only give you reason to think that those advantages are outweighed by other reasons not to accept the view.

"How important is the claim 'God exists necessarily' to the overall argument?"

It's very important to include that claim within the picture of theism that I say has ontological advantages over materialism. The argument doesn't really make sense without it.

"If God is omnipotent, then it seems like God can't be constrained by his/her/it's inherent nature."

In general, being unable to do certain things is actually important for our integrity as persons. Harry Frankfurt explains this pretty compellingly, I think, in one of the essays in this (not the Bullshit one!). I think the same is true of God.

I don't think God's omnipotence conflicts with, e.g., his not being able to lie. Plantinga's Does God Have a Nature? considers a number of questions like this, I think.

(Just noticed the link for Plantinga above was goofed up for some reason. Sorry about that. Here's Rea on material constitution, which also similarly goofed up in the same comment.)

"[W]hy does God's necessary nature constrain us? Even if we posit a really powerful creator who can't change his/her/it's own goodness, presumably I can choose evil, so what's the problem for me?"

Well, to paraphrase Nixon, you could do it, but it would be wrong. In the theistic picture I sketch, it's just the nature of God to supply reasons for action, some of them conclusive. See my 5:21 above for some more elaboration.

# posted by

Chris : 4:33 PM

"we first set out traditional theism ..."

Reduced to logical propositions, then, your argument is:

1. Assume Theism -> God exists and God is a TM.

2. Assume Theism is true.

3. Then a TM exists, which -> necessary moral propositions exist. (Otherwise, what would it mean to be a TM?)

4. These necessary moral propositions can constitute an "ontological ground" for human morality.

But as noted earlier, there is an implicit clause in 4: "if they can be reliably and verifiably conveyed to humans". But the existence of such a communication system can't be assumed ("I'd say the individual human conscience" won't cut it if we want a coherent logical argument). Or more accurately, it can be assumed, but then your "argument" degenerates to:

If an unsurpassed TM exists and the inevitable output of that TM can be reliably and verifiably conveyed to humans, that output can (must?) be an ontological ground for human morality".

To which it seems the only reasonable response is "yeh, and so?".

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 4:43 PM

Charles: Here's a short form of my premises and conclusion:

Premise 1: Some moral claims are true.

Premise 2: True moral claims require truthmakers.

Premise 3: Moral claims, if true at all, need to be necessarily true.

Premise 4: Truthmakers for necessarily-true propositions need to exist necessarily.

Premise 5: It is possible to construct a version of theism so that it includes a necessarily-existent truthmaker for moral claims.

Premise 6: It is not possible to construct a version of materialism so that it includes a necessarily-existent truthmaker for moral claims.

Conclusion: Theism as constructed in premise 5 has ontological advantages over materialism.

Note: neither God's essential goodness, nor God's necessity, nor theism at all, is a premise of the argument. Only the fact that it is possible to construct a version of theism that includes these features is.

Why does it matter that God, on certain assumptions, can be a truthmaker for moral claims? Because it establishes premise 5. Of course, you might not care whether the conclusion is true, but I take it a lot of people do.

# posted by

Chris : 5:15 PM

Chris,

You're mounting an impressive case.

I must say I'm still a tad unclear about a few things, so maybe I can get closer to understanding with another post:

1) Is the assumption that moral claims have truth value just a mere assumption in the argument? I mean to say that, if we simply assume that moral claims have truth value, then I agree that theism has certain advantages over materialism. But what happens when materialists simply admit that they don't really believe in normativity or morality at all beyond pragmatic arrangements born of evolution?

I had thought that the point made by Tamanaha was getting at the core, which is whether or not we can actually feel confident about the actual truth of our moral claims. And I think that if we don't assume that moral claims have truth value, (which honestly, seems like a natural non-assumption to make, when I think about it) then theism and materialism are in the same boat at the end of the day.

So I agree that if the assumption is made that moral claims (at least some of them) are true then theism is a more promising candidate than materialism, if for no other reason than it gets us further down the road.

2) But I think Charles said something I was trying to say, only better. When I asked why God's nature would should be compelling on me, what I was trying to get at was what I think what Charles was getting at when he said that a reliable communication system cannot be assumed between us and God.

Now I'm not positive if Charles meant to go as far as I'm about to, but I think that goes a little deeper than just whether or not we can have revelation, or some other means of intuiting God's will or nature.

What I mean is that, how can I be wrong using my free will just because my will goes against something God wills? What is the connector?

How is it that it's wrong to go against God's will?

The only thing I can come up with is that God is really, really, powerful. But surely there's more than that right?

3) If we make the moral law...impersonal...for lack of a better word, then I think that its unchanging nature starts to make more sense. If God is an individual, then the only comparison we can make is with ourselves. If we assume otherwise, it seems like we're introducing something overly arbitrary into the argument so as to make morality unchanging but retain a personal creator.

Anyway, with ourselves, we can easily imagine changing. We see people change, or we see them exhibit good behavior for a long time, then they start to exhibit bad behavior. If God is an individual with intentions and the like, then it must be technically possible for God to change. But even if we impose an unchanging feature into the personal God, then that still seems to fall short of making God's nature compelling on me.

We agree that I can do something, even if it goes against God's will, but I just don't see why that makes my action wrong.

It seems to me that if we had some sort of impersonal moral law, then the question about it being otherwise, thereby reversing our morality instincts, becomes less applicable than when it's applied to a personal God. Personal beings can change their minds, to say otherwise seems like an overly awkward imposition.

Oh and I agree that many people care about this topic, and the conclusion you draw, I'm one of them.

# posted by

Jay J : 6:17 PM

Chris: looking at how you've structured your claim, it seems like God's goodness is not a necessary component of it at all. Rather, the necessarily existing truthmaker could be God's nature, full stop. So I don't think what I am saying undermines your claim that an necessarily existing God with a necessary nature could provide an ontologic ground for moral statements (note, however, that the source of obligation in this schema is still somewhat obscure, as Prof. Koppelman has noted. But that is a feature of literally every moral system, so far as I can see, so I'm not sure it's a defect of your claim.

But it would help if you could explain why the claim that "God is good" isn't circular in your system. In other words, to specify whether something is morally good, normally I have to assert that it would correspond with God's necessary nature. So for the claim "charity is good," I could substitute the phrase "charity corresponds with God's essential nature" without loss of meaning, right? Indeed, I would say that this substitution feature is an important element of an ontologic ground.

(In a similar way, I might say that to call something "Hesperus" is to call it "the planet that appears from the surface of the earth as a evening star, which corresponds with the planetary body we call Venus." So I should be able to replace the word "Hesperus" with that string in any sentence without a loss of meaning.)

When we try to do this with "God is good," we get "God corresponds with God's essential nature," which seems a bit trivial, doesn't it? This is a different way of saying the Euthyphro thing, but I think it is important nonetheless. I'm sure you could evade this with some philosophy of language stuff (probably similar to how people attacked Russell's theory of definite descriptions) but it seems an important point to me nevertheless.

It seems to me fairly fundamental that we can either have goodness rooted very firmly in the nature of a God that just is, or else we can have a God with a good nature, but we have to ground the meaning of that statement somewhere else. Otherwise, God and good kind of collapse together in terms of meaning, with good becoming just a way to describe the relationship of being obligated in some way by God's nature, but without any plausible claim of justification based on any particular features that God has.

So, I understand that it is meaningful to say that Kent=Superman, because I can unpack that as (entity n, which is a reporter for the daily news, etc, is the same entity as entity n, which is a superhero, and therefore the reporter = the superhero). But I confess to being a bit puzzled how we could pull of the same trick with "God is good" without getting a bit tautological, or at least a bit underwhelming, with the claim.

# posted by

Unknown : 6:38 PM

Jay: "Is the assumption that moral claims have truth value just a mere assumption in the argument?"

That's right. I don't have much to say in defense of that.

"When I asked why God's nature would should be compelling on me, what I was trying to get at was what I think what Charles was getting at when he said that a reliable communication system cannot be assumed between us and God."

I take it that moral faculties--our consciences--are a chief way that God tells us what our moral obligations are. Here's my explanation from earlier:

"[M]:'Why should we say that God's nature or will give us conclusive reason to do anything? What unique property of God gives him this status?'

"Here’s one way to think about it. No one [at least, no one who thinks we can have moral knowledge] will doubt, I think, that our moral faculties--our consciences--are, in fact, capable of grasping basic reasons for action and moral properties like good and bad and right and wrong. On the theistic picture, God is ultimately responsible for the existence of those faculties. And God intends that those faculties will grasp him as the highest good. When presented with sufficient information about God, people will echo Psalm 73 and say, 'there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.' The theistic story is that those who know everything about God respond that way; those who respond otherwise are mistaken in some way.

"Suppose we were to meet an all-powerful, all-knowing being whose requirements matched up amazingly well with our intuitions about what ought to be the case, and this being told us that those intuitions were the result of a basic faculty of moral judgment that he made sure human beings possessed. I think it would make a lot of sense, were that to happen, to conclude that our moral intuitions did indeed point back to this being as the ground for their truth.

"Dialectically, I don’t imagine this sort of gesture at an explanation will be compelling. But my point is just this: the theist has a proper sort of candidate for the highest good, but the materialist doesn’t. Showing the adequacy of that candidate requires demonstrating how compelling this being is, given all of the many actual details of what he commands."

M: "[I]t would help if you could explain why the claim that 'God is good' isn't circular in your system."

Here's one way to think about it. God's goodness is like the meterhood of the standard meter bar. Now, of course the standard meter bar is a meter long--in one sense that's true by definition. So, of course the standard for goodness has to be good. But the fact that the standard meter bar is the standard meter bar--that is, the facts on the basis fo which a particular bar is the standard for measuring meters--is complicated and non-trivial. Similarly, the fact that God is the standard for goodness and rightness and obligation and so on is a non-trivial fact about him.

M: "[Hesperus is described by a string of words,] [s]o I should be able to replace the word 'Hesperus' with that string in any sentence without a loss of meaning."

Hmm. Only if it's referentially transparent. So we can't go from "Ptolemy knows that Hesperus is Hesperus" to "Ptolemy knows that Hesperus is Phosphorus." Similarly, people can believe "torture is morally forbidden," but not believe "torture is forbidden by God," even if, in fact, the ontological ground for what's morally forbidden is what's forbidden by God.

"[W]e can either have goodness rooted very firmly in the nature of a God that just is, or else we can have a God with a good nature, but we have to ground the meaning of that statement somewhere else. Otherwise, God and good kind of collapse together in terms of meaning..."

No, I don't think they collapse together in meaning, only in nature. We can understand the meaning of "morally obligatory" as "required by whatever it is that my moral faculties are reliably relecting (in alpha, our world)." We can understand "required by God" as "required by an all-powerful, all-knowing, self-existent being." Now, if it turns out that our moral faculties reliably reflect what an all-powerful, all-knowing, self-existent being requires, then God's requirements will be moral requirements. But that doesn't follow just from the meaning of the terms.

# posted by

Chris : 7:12 PM

"I think that goes a little deeper than just whether or not we can have revelation ... how can I be wrong using my free will just because my will goes against something God wills?"

To clarify, my point was that even if one accepts the assumption that there are necessary moral claims and thus a TM for those claims, humans still need three things in order to have an ontological ground for morality:

1. a way of reliably receiving the necessary moral claims

2. a way of verifying that the transmitter of those claims is in fact a (the?) TM for them

3. a commitment to follow them if we have 1 and 2 (otherwise, we aren't serious about seeking a ground for our morality)

Ie, I'm assuming that if we feel confident that we are getting "authoritative" inputs, we will want to adhere to them. But then, perhaps you're more of a rebel than I.

BTW, the reason I'm not too excited about Prof Green's conclusion re the shortcoming of "materialism" (aside from not seeing why that "ism" is of any interest given various comments above) is that I am aware of nothing that would suggest to me that 1 and 2 have ever been satisfied (eg, the Bible fails on both counts). So, I'm resigned to making do with a less-than-perfect man-made morality until the real thing comes along.

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 11:37 PM

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Jay J : 11:56 PM

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Jay J : 12:00 AM

Chris,

I think I'm honing in on the target of the disagreement.

I see that moral statements are assumed to have truth value, but I'll come back to that.

You quoted something you said earlier:

"Suppose we were to meet an all-powerful, all-knowing being whose requirements matched up amazingly well with our intuitions about what ought to be the case, and this being told us that those intuitions were the result of a basic faculty of moral judgment that he made sure human beings possessed. I think it would make a lot of sense, were that to happen, to conclude that our moral intuitions did indeed point back to this being as the ground for their truth."

The last few words are where I find the difficulty, "...conclude that our moral intuitions did indeed point back to this being (God) as the ground for their truth."

See I can see that, (starting from my agnosticism about the truth value of moral statements), if I encountered such a being, I could feel justified in pointing back to this being as the ground of the existence of my moral sentiments, but not necessarily their truth.

Truth and existence are different things. You're assuming the truth value of moral statements, so I imagine that you do not mean by "truth" that our sentiments are confirmed as existing.

And since you already believe that moral statements have truth value, then this Divine Being is seen as being a ground for the truth of moral statements (at least some of them).

Coming back to the truth value of moral statements, this seems to be the core of what Tamanaha and Koppelman were getting at by saying that theists and atheists were both hard pressed to justify the foundations of their moral views. I take the word "foundations" to mean something about whether these statements actually do have truth value outside of expressing our personal preferences.

Assuming that moral statements have truth value may allow some philosophical breadth, but doesn't seem to answer the spirit of the entries by Tamanaha, etc.

I'm not saying that belief in whether or not such a Divine Being exists is crucial, at least not here.

It seems like positing a metaphysical ground for deeply held intuitions has some advantages, even if we cannot confirm the existence of this metaphysical ground.

There have been a few types of responses to the kind of argument you're making:

1) God grounds our moral intuitions, which have truth value.

2) God's actual existence is crucial to this argument, and since there is no evidence for God's existence, the argument fails.

3) Positing God (or another metaphysical entity) may be beneficial if this allowance grounds some of our deeply held intuitions, so long as what we're positing actually does the explaining, and this explanation is itself intelligible.

The reason I've outlined the three types of responses above is that I suspect that my replies are starting to sound like those in category 2, but they're really of category 3.

What I will probably remain unconvinced of is the move that our consciences are the ways that God communicates morality. It's not a factual objection I have, its one about the intelligibility of your overall argument.

Some people just don't have that good a moral sense. Some people really do cause allot of needless suffering, and some people even kind of enjoy doing so.

I know just about every moral and psychological system has ad hoc ways of declaring such people deficient, but it seems like the existence of such people is enough to cast serious doubt on the example about our moral consciences serving as cues for the realism of moral claims.

The problem is that we don't have anything to appeal to, outside of ourselves, to decide that we're right and the sociopaths are wrong.

God's existence just adds another individual on our side of the scale. Granted, God's weight would be infinitely more than ours put together, but the existence of a really powerful and "moral" being does not, by itself, definitively decide the difference between ourselves and the sociopaths.

God's weight may be "more" but I just don't see how it's automatically "right."

I had thought that you were attempting to answer Tamanaha's claim that theists and atheists have equally tenuous foundations for their moral views.

It seems like your assumption of "moral truth" is needed to refute Tamanaha's claim, when Tamanaha's original point was that both theism and atheism are both hard pressed to find warranted reasons to believe in moral truth, I think.

But if what you were doing was only giving the original theistic argument a clearer expression, then I apologize for not tracing the argument more closely.

Jay

# posted by

Jay J : 12:04 AM

Charles,

I see now what you're getting at.

Nevertheless some of the things you said seemed to give clearer expression to something I was trying to say, which now seems like a coincidence.

My 12:04 AM post above is closest yet to the target I was trying to hit.

Thanks,

Jay

# posted by

Jay J : 12:05 AM

The meter example is interesting, in that I agree that meterness is different than the bare existence of the meter rod...but this is a good example of how this property is also arbitrary. The relation proceeds by an act of human definition. I feel like we need a better example, one that it isn't an arbitrary choice to relate an object to a conceptual property (unless you feel that the choice of God as a ground is similarly arbitrary).

No, I don't think they collapse together in meaning, only in nature. We can understand the meaning of "morally obligatory" as "required by whatever it is that my moral faculties are reliably relecting (in alpha, our world)." We can understand "required by God" as "required by an all-powerful, all-knowing, self-existent being." Now, if it turns out that our moral faculties reliably reflect what an all-powerful, all-knowing, self-existent being requires, then God's requirements will be moral requirements. But that doesn't follow just from the meaning of the terms.

Now we are getting to the good stuff! This is really helpful, in that it unpacks some of your intuitions, such as how God both grounds morality, and could be found to be immoral. If I read this right, you are actually saying something subtle and quite interesting (and not, at least to my mind, clearly developed in your prior postings to this site). You say that we can understand the meaning of "morally obligatory" as "required by whatever it is that my moral faculties are reliably relecting (in alpha, our world). This, to my reading, suggests that the meaning of moral statements, and correlatively their ontologic ground, is actually not a single entity, but rather a conjunction; a moral proposition is true if it is (1) presented to us by our moral faculties, and (2) if those faculties are reliably reflecting some non-internal ground (in your system, defined to be God). This makes God's goodness non-trivial, in that once there is no longer a correspondence between God's nature and the output of our moral faculties, the moral statement would become false (or at least, non-cognitive). That explains your intuition that if, hypothetically, God was discovered to have a different nature that we currently suspect, God would be wrong in some sense, and we would lose our ground for morality (it would not persist in the form described, because the jointness property has vanished). But it also explains why you feel that God creates such an important improvement; it is easy to imagine our moral faculties varying greatly between possible worlds, but harder to imagine them reliably reflecting an external ground in all possible worlds, unless that ground was both necessary and able to (and necessarily choses to) act to preserve that correspondence in all possible worlds.

I'm not sure I've ever come across a claim of this stripe before. (Of course, I may have made this up; you may not have meant such a strong implication by your last paragraph, even if this explanation does help to explain your insistance that goodness is non-trivially applicable to God, and that thereby the some of the arbitrariness sting of Euthyphro is removed).

Because this is so new to me, I need to ponder it a bit before replying further. It seems to be internally consistent, and to support the claims you've made. It is, of course, still dependent on the improbable theological claims being accepted, but that doesn't make it internally invalid.

# posted by

Unknown : 12:30 AM

p.s. please excuse the poor expression of the prior post; it was composed late at night, and in a hurry. I hope you can tease the actual meaning out of what I said; if not, let me know, and I will repost it with corrections. sorry!

# posted by

Unknown : 12:33 AM

jay -

"some of the things you said seemed to give clearer expression to something I was trying to say, which now seems like a coincidence."

Maybe not. When I addressed the problem of verification, although I was using the language of comm theory, I really had in mind something like a miracle which would demonstrate omnipotence. But as you have correctly noted, "might doesn't make right". I was assuming that somehow one would be able to verify the TM's identity and thus would accept the TM's dictate of moral behavior because they choose to be moral.

But I don't really have an idea of how one might implement the verification. In comm theory, it's done via a "signature" agreed on by the parties a priori, but that general idea doesn't apply here.

Perhaps I should have seen this problem earlier, having just read Simon Blackburn's book "Truth: a Guide", the essential message (at least my rather tenuous understanding thereof) being that "truth" is a really slippery concept, partly due to the problem of what one uses as the standard for determining how close one's estimate of the "truth" is (the TM?). And that's vis-a-vis plain old vanilla truth ("that ball is red"); for moral truth it can only be harder.

And of course one can choose not to be moral even if one is confident they know necessary moral truths, via conscience or any other way. Believers do it all the time.

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 1:59 AM

In case you missed it, Andy Koppelman has some reaction to this thread here.

Me: "Suppose we were to meet an all-powerful, all-knowing being whose requirements matched up amazingly well with our intuitions about what ought to be the case, and this being told us that those intuitions were the result of a basic faculty of moral judgment that he made sure human beings possessed. I think it would make a lot of sense, were that to happen, to conclude that our moral intuitions did indeed point back to this being as the ground for their truth."
Jay: "See I can see that, (starting from my agnosticism about the truth value of moral statements), if I encountered such a being, I could feel justified in pointing back to this being as the ground of the existence of my moral sentiments, but not necessarily their truth."

I should, perhaps, make clear that I'm imaging someone doing that who already has the belief that his moral faculties reliably reflect moral reality. Consider these beliefs:

(1) My moral faculties reliably reflect moral reality.
(2) My moral faculties exist and function as they do solely because the God in charge of the universe intends those faculties to reflect his character and nature.

Now, it's one thing to say that (2) doesn't give us any reason to believe (1). Maybe so. But someone who already believes (1) doesn't necessarily have any compelling reason to give that belief up if he comes to believe (2), I think. And that's all I need to make good the claim that theism could provide a truthmaker for moral claims.

Compare
(2*) My moral faculties exist and function as they do because they reliably track--somehow!--a particular necessarily-existent object; call it the moral law.

I similarly don't think (2*) necessarily gives us reason to believe (1), but also doesn't necessarily give us reason to abandon it.

Jay: "Coming back to the truth value of moral statements, this seems to be the core of what Tamanaha and Koppelman were getting at by saying that theists and atheists were both hard pressed to justify the foundations of their moral views."

I don't think so; Koppelman noted here that Tamanaha's argument was about epistemic foundations, not ontological ones.

Jay: "Some people just don't have that good a moral sense. Some people really do cause a lot of needless suffering, and some people even kind of enjoy doing so. I know just about every moral and psychological system has ad hoc ways of declaring such people deficient, but it seems like the existence of such people is enough to cast serious doubt on the example about our moral consciences serving as cues for the realism of moral claims. The problem is that we don't have anything to appeal to, outside of ourselves, to decide that we're right and the sociopaths are wrong. God's existence just adds another individual on our side of the scale."

But if we assume that our moral faculties are, in general, reliable, we can explain sociopaths if we can explain how their faculties malfunction. And if we have information about the God who intends those faculties to reflect his character and nature, that information would be qualitatively different from just "another individual." The author of our moral faculties would obviously have a privileged position in explaining when those faculties are misfiring.

M: "[I]t is easy to imagine our moral faculties varying greatly between possible worlds, but harder to imagine them reliably reflecting an external ground in all possible worlds, unless that ground was both necessary and able to (and necessarily chooses to) act to preserve that correspondence in all possible worlds."

Actually, I only mean to commit to our moral faculties being generally reliable in this world--that's what the bit about alpha was supposed to do. It might be that an omnibenevolent, self-disclosing God would generally not leave any possible world without some witness of moral reality, but I only meant to say that we, in this world, could define the term "moral obligation" to refer to whatever it is that grounds our assessment of obligation by moral faculties as those faculties exist in this world.

Charles: "humans still need …in order to have an ontological ground for morality: 1. a way of reliably receiving the necessary moral claims; 2. a way of verifying that the transmitter of those claims is in fact a (the?) [truthmaker] for them … I am aware of nothing that would suggest to me that 1 and 2 have ever been satisfied (e.g., the Bible fails on both counts)."

The "the Bible fails" claim seems pretty controversial. I'm also not sure why conscience can't work, at least in some really basic cases. But I'm also not sure what these demands have to do with the need for a truthmaker. Humans need these things, in the sense that it would be very nice to have them, but I'm not sure why the failure of theism, or any other system, to satisfy them should make us feel any better about doing without truthmakers altogether. Even if "ontological ground" could be used to refer to a larger set of desiderata, the fact that a view includes truthmakers is at least one ontological advantage.

# posted by

Chris : 3:40 PM

The reason I suggested that you would want your inner intuition to work reliably across all possible worlds is that it is capable, at least in theory, of making moral truths necessarily true. If there are universes under which God's nature remains constant, but our moral intuition does not reflect it, you lose the conjoint of ontologic grounds that I described above, in my attempt to characterize the import of your definition of "morally required." If you need both 1 and 2 to be true, and if you need to show that moral propositions are necessarily true, than you can't ever have a variance between one and two.

The more I think about it, though, this is an additional hurdle for yoru claim, because now you have to show not only that God necessarily exists, but also that he must necessarily create beings with accurate moral faculties. I'm sure that there are theologists who might argue something like that, but it does make the premise conditions more challenging to accept.

I still don't know if you view my characterization of your claim as accurate or not. I'm curious, if you care to reply on that score.

# posted by

Unknown : 3:51 PM

Chris,

This has been an interesting discussion.

I see now that I may have neglected key parts of Tamanaha's or Koppelman's arguments.

I guess if ontology is out, then I agree with you.

It's just that ontology is the crux, IMHO.

If we're talking about truth-makers, then I would assume that we're in an agnostic position about the truth value of moral claims.

If we're not agnostic about moral claims, but believe they are ( at least some of them) true, then meeting God is just the gravy, it's just a confirmation of something we already believe.

However if we NEED a truth-maker, then that to me implies that we don't know if moral claims have truth value, and if that's the case, then meeting God doesn't provide the truth-maker.

We may be talking past each other by now, but I suppose I would have to concur with M, that such a truth-maker would be underwhelming.

Maybe M was talking about something else, but just to acknowledge the word M used, if we already see moral claims as having truth value, then meeting God, and seeing God as the truth-maker, seems a little ad hoc.

Perhaps I didn't see the boundaries of the argument from the beginning, if so, my bad.

But because of, or maybe in spite of our hosts main points, I see the truth value or lack thereof of moral claims to be the crux of the issue.

But I am starting to see how valid your argument is while it operates under certain assumptions.

# posted by

Jay J : 3:52 PM

I'm also not sure why conscience can't work, at least in some really basic cases.

I think the challenge is the problem of moral disagreement, both locally and across cultures. If different people reach very different results when relying on their moral intuition, that is a reason to doubt that either faculty is reliably reflecting something that is unchanging.

# posted by

Unknown : 3:54 PM

Jay said: However if we NEED a truth-maker, then that to me implies that we don't know if moral claims have truth value, and if that's the case, then meeting God doesn't provide the truth-maker.

Jay, I think the idea here is that something is only true if it has a truth-maker--that is, a fact about the world in virtue of which it is true. So, Chris and I were discussing the degree to which different systems of believe give us a plausible candidate for that claim as it relates to moral propositions.

To give an example: "Susan is 58 years old" has a truth-value, because we can plausibly identify a candidate for facts about the world that would make it true or false (there exists a human being named Susan, that we have identified, who has been alive and out of the womb for more than 58 and less than 59 years).

So, if we are to be moral realists (believe that moral statements are either true or false) we have to identify what facts about the world make those statements true or false.

If we believe that moral statements have truthmakers (or in an alternative lingo, an ontologic ground) then we can believe that they are capable of being true or false.

If we are unsure of whether they have truthmakers (as I am), then we should be moral skeptics, uncertain whether moral statements are capable of truth values.

If we believe that moral truthmakers don't exist, then we should be moral anti-realists or moral non-cognitivists, and deny that moral statements are capable of being right or wrong.

Note, however, that all of the above skips over some important meta-ethical questions, as I alluded to above. Until we pin down what we mean by a moral statement (a matter of great dispute among philosohers) then we can't really start on the other stuff. Chris and I were both working off of some classical assumptions about moral meaning (neccesary, obligating, etc), but these are by now means the only possible answers. So if you come to think that moral statements have a different meaning, you should then be adjusting your conception of what would make them true. For instance, an attitudinalist would say, "moral statements are just an expression of a personal attitude or feeling about some fact," and be able to claim that this makes it easy to find truthmakers -- all you have to do is look at a speaker's attitudes.

So anyway, I think you have it backwards when you say that we don't need moral truthmakers if we are moral realists (if we already think there is such a thing as moral truth and moral falsity). If you think that, you are assuming, either consciously or as a matter of philosophic necessity, that there is a truthmaker out there somewhere. Proving that there isn't should alter your views about moral realism, at least if you want to be consistent.

# posted by

Unknown : 4:09 PM

M: "I still don't know if you view my characterization of your claim as accurate or not. I'm curious, if you care to reply on that score."

No, I wasn't claiming that moral faculties are reliable in all possible worlds; I suggested that a particular person could define goodness or other moral language in terms of whatever it is that her moral faculties--in alpha, the particular possible world she is part of--reliably reflect. That is, one particular person would say that moral reality, for all possible worlds, is whatever her moral faculties reliably reflect in this world. Moral knowledge wouldn't have to exist in every world, but moral reality would.

# posted by

Chris : 4:58 PM

re conscience:

One might view their own conscience as akin to a black box which outputs "moral intuition". Now that output may come (possibly indirectly) from the TM, but it may just as well come from a combination of indoctrination, genetic effects, digestion of the insights from a great books program, et al, or from a brain-resident parasite randomly generating moral aphorisms from the available vocabulary. How does one tell which?

And taking it up a level, even if one feels confident that their sense of a necessary moral claim comes from the TM, in order to have a social impact that claim has to be conveyed convincingly to others. But how do we decide which person's "dictate of conscience" is true when there is - inevitably - conflict?

Thus, it seems that even if we assume away the ontological problems, we keep bumping into epistemic ones.

In any event, back to the original issue of the relative weight of theism's moral ground vs "materialism's". At least a rational argument in support of a moral claim can be analyzed, challenged, debated, etc. Not to say, of course, that this makes an agreed upon moral claim necessary, just that at least it is the result of those procedures, which gives some of us a warm fuzzy. What is the analogous warm fuzzy-producing procedure in converting possibly disparate dictates of conscience into an agreed upon moral claim?

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 5:07 PM

Hi M,

I agree that if we already believe that moral claims have truth value, then it must be the case that there is some truth-maker out there.

But this seems backwords. This backwordness was what I was trying to get at.

The reason I think moral truth, or lack thereof, is the real issue, is that it's what seems to be in question.

If morality is true, then it follows that its got a truth-maker out there somewhere.

However it occurs to me that when it comes to non-mundane truth (mundane truth would be like...all bachelors being unmarried, 2+2=4, etc) we usually find the truth-maker first right?

I'm not getting at whether or not God exists, I'm getting at the process we usually go by when determining what's true about things as slippery as moral truth. Even if we are wondering if metals expand when heated, we test it, we don't beleive it until its demonstrated. We don't assume it's true, then go about searching for a confirmation. Any truth assumption would be simply for working purposes. Even if a pre-test truth assumption about metals expanding were literal, it would be subject to change, and would be considered unconfirmed.

Assuming the truth of something, then going about trying to assign some entity truth-maker status, seems backwords, especially if the truth-maker doesn't actually justify anything other than the mere existence of some sentiments He injected into us.

If we already believe in moral truth, which seems like quite an epistemoligcal leap, then are we really looking for a truth-maker? It seems like if we were treating the issue with epistemoligcal seriousness, we would insist that the truth of moral statement be demonstrated, instead of just figuring that moral statements have truth value, then going about looking for TM candidates.

You bring up an important issue with moral disagreement. This should cause some concern about our moral consciences being a reliable source of metaphysical information.

Why we find our view more justified than another is an unjustifed feeling, so going about finding a truth-maker for our feelings seems like putting the cart before the horse.

To top it all off, I still just don't see, even if I accept moral truth, that another subject, as omnipotent as He may be, is the source of "rightness."

God is only God. The fact that God created us a certain way is fine, but it doesn't say anything about justification. On this issue there may be some lingering disagreement between Chris and I.

On which order we should go in when determing what's true, we're probably only talking past one another by now.

# posted by

Jay J : 5:18 PM

Jay: I agree with you that if Chris was trying to use this argument to show either that God existed, or that moral realism was valid, he'd be on intellectually very shaky territory.

But I think he's been very straightforward in announcing what he is doing: this is an inquiry about possibility. In other words, he's trying to see if some beliefs (moral realism and necessary-god theism) coexist better than some other beliefs (materialism and moral realism). Sometimes this takes a bit of a flavor that he is recommending belief shopping based on the consequences of what one believes rather than the epistemic merits of the claim, but that is an uncharitable reading. Rather, I think he is merely exploring whether a belief that is important to him (moral realism) is consistent with various other beliefs.

As for the order of inquiry, I'd have to say that it depends. If you can show that a truthmaker doesn't exist (i.e. that it is impossible or some such) than you can quickly avoid worrying about whether a particular proposition is true or not (because it is a meaningless question in that case). I agree that the content of morality is an important inquiry for a moral realist as well. But that doesn't mean that it isn't also useful for them to occasionally spend some time seeing if they have any dangerous cracks in their ontological foundation.

# posted by

Unknown : 5:26 PM

Hi M,

I hope my interpretation of Chris wasn't too uncharitable.

I see that Chris wasn't trying to show that God existed.

I did however take him to be defending moral realism. If that's not the case, then I think there is still an elephant in the room regarding whether God serves a purpose that materialists are without.

Even if God exists, that only grounds the existence of our views, it doesn't justify them.

My view is that a personal justification won't work.

If what we're left with is that at least theism was able to give it the ole' college try, then that seems like little consolation, and not too different than stating that problems of moral justification simply show up at different places in theism and atheism.

Basically, I'm unconvinced that God's existence does anything but provide a sort of genealogy of the existence of our moral beliefs. But they remain unjustified. Even I assumed that moral claims have truth value, I just don't see how God's existence would be the TM, since any TM should justify morality, not simply show that it starts somewhere, materialists can do that too with evolutionary psychology.

So as far as things like rights, obligations, and justifications of morality, I remain a moral skeptic.

This issue of moral skepticism v. moral realism seemed to be at the heart of the original discussion, but I certainly may be wrong about that.

# posted by

Jay J : 6:01 PM

"The "the Bible fails" claim seems pretty controversial."

Of course - in everything anyone says in this kind of discussion there is always (or at least should be) an implicit "IMO". But it's a matter of whom you believe: the Ehrmans or the Falwells of the world. I'll always go with Ehrmans.

"I'm not sure why the failure of theism, or any other system, to satisfy them should make us feel any better about doing without truthmakers."

It's not a matter of "feeling better" - I assume all of us would like clean, unequivocal answers to our moral dilemmas. But that doesn't mean we'll get them (I've essentially bet my soul that we can't!) I'm just trying to follow the logic of your argument and explore the practical consequences. And **IMO**, moral claims that can't be certified to be necessary (ie, received reliably from a source verified as being a/the TM) are no better - and arguably sometimes worse - than those created by humans using rational processes.

In short, I'm doubly skeptical - I doubt that there's a TM, and even if there is I don't see how my requirements of reliability and verifiability can be met.

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 6:11 PM

Hi Jay,

I wasn't really defending moral realism, only assuming it. In terms of the order of analysis, the philosophy of mathematics starts with mathematical claims, and then tries to figure out what could make them true (not the axioms, since not even number theory is axiomatizable). I'm not sure how the mundane/non-mundane distinction would work. A lot of math is less mundane than "lying is morally wrong" and the like.

# posted by

Chris : 6:13 PM

This comment has been removed by the author.

# posted by

Unknown : 6:34 PM

Hi Chris,

You've mounted one of the most impressive cases on this topic that I've run across.

Running with the analogy with the Philosophy of Mathematics, it seems to me that the claims in this realm are very negotiable, or changeable.

And there is a standard of confirmation about what would confirm a claim, it seems to me.

I think, (though I'm not sure), that I've found the bottom line disagreement:

I just don't see how, even if we met the Judeo-Christian God, that morality would be justified as true. I can agree that it would be justified as existing, but materialists do this with evolutionary psychology.

I think a justification is what's being sought, rather than a genealogy. So my objection isn't about whether or not we could meet God, its about whether that could even in principle serve as a "proof."

Now if we meet God and then God said something like "OK, let me tell you all about morality," well then maybe we would be onto something, since then God may be the messenger of some great external (external to ourselves) truth.

In Buddhism, there is a saying, "Don't confuse the finger for the moon." The Buddha is the finger, but the moon is the real message.

I'm open to God existing within some other system of morality, but if God is the origin, then I don't think that justifies anything, it simply gives a history or a genealogy of morality.

Even though I'm open to impersonal justifications that morality is somehow...metaphysically immutable...I still think concepts like rights, obligations, and responsibilities are in critical condition...near death, ontologically speaking.

Basically, since I see now that you weren't defending moral realism, then the order of operations becomes less important.

What remains is that I don't think the claim (about morality) is confirmed even if we meet God.

I wish those of us who are participating in this discussion could just get together in a class room and hash it all out for an hour or so. That would be a blast. I'm a philosophy undergrad, and I'm off to class right now. Not a philosophy class, but a math class, appropriately enough.

Have a good night.

Jay

# posted by

Jay J : 6:37 PM

This issue of moral skepticism v. moral realism seemed to be at the heart of the original discussion, but I certainly may be wrong about that.

It definitely formed a big part of the original Tamahana discussion. Chris's post is a bit of an offshoot, I think, designed to lay out his views of why, despite what Tamahana was saying, he thinks there is a better link between theism and moral realism than there is between materialism and moral realism.

# posted by

Unknown : 6:38 PM

m:

Based on your 4:09 PM comment, I think I finally get the point (and realize that most of my comments were irrelevant - which is no surprise, but I compose comments for my own purposes, often deleting one after hours spent composing it).

I still don't understand why the relative ontological merit of materialism is of interest, nor why the ontological merit of any position vis-a-vis TMs is of interest in the absence of a channel back to us, but at least I think I understand that to be the issue Prof Green is addressing - as I belated see he laid out pretty clearly in his "six premises and a conclusion" comment yesterday (I think - sure wish blogspot dated stamped comments).

Thanks - Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 7:03 PM

Jay: "I just don't see how, even if we met the Judeo-Christian God, that morality would be justified as true. I can agree that it would be justified as existing, but materialists do this with evolutionary psychology."

My claim isn't that ambitious, though. I'm only saying that if we, at time 1, believe that our moral faculties reflect moral reality, and then, at time 2, come to learn that our moral faculties reflect God's character and nature, we shouldn't, just in virtue of that discovery, abandon the belief we had at time 1. I'm not saying that finding things out about God as the origin of our moral faculties would, in itself, necessarily justify our initial belief, only that that wouldn't necessarily undermine it.

# posted by

Chris : 10:48 AM

Chris,

I suppose I've suspected you of saying several things you're actually not saying...Thanks for hanging in there with me.

I had thought that you were saying that God's nature is how it ought to be.

It seems to me that this is/ought thing is related to justification.

We need for the "is" to somehow be justified in order for it to count as an "ought." If God's nature doesn't justify our belief in moral truth, but only doesn't undermine it, then we still have to say that just because God "is" a certain way, this doesn't mean that we "ought" to follow him. The is/ought part of your original entry seems relevant to this.

For the record, my attraction to some impersonal moral law is also flawed in this way, a you've pointed out. For this reason, I think "oughts" are mental constructs invented by humans, nothing more, nothing less.

However an impersonal moral law could still be true in all possible universes. For example, cruelty would always be de-edifying and true joy would always only be produced by loving acts, thoughts, and motives. But the "oughts," "rights," "obligations," etc would still have no foundation, and if it were seen this way, then beings might have to get by on other motivations.

I had also thought that you were saying that theism's advantage over materialism is that theism at least proposes a candidate for the justification of moral truth, and this candidate is God. My point is that I believe, even in principle, that God would not justify anything.

I also believe that finding out that evolutionary psychology is how our moral sentiments evolved shouldn't undermine our belief in moral truth.

In either case, evolutionary psychology on the one hand, and God on the other, finding out they were true shouldn't necessarily undermine belief in moral truth.

That's because both evolutionary psychology and God could be a big PART of why morality is the way it is.

However if atheists tell me that evolutionary psychology is not only the proximate cause of morality, but also the ONLY (or ultimate) cause of morality, I must tell them that this is not a justification for normativity.

And if theists tell me that God is not only a proximate cause of morality, but again the ultimate cause, then I have to say once again that this is not a justification, so no "ought" flows from either the theist or the atheist explanation.

But I suppose I agree that meeting God should not necessarily undermine belief in moral truth, I do however think no "oughts" flow from this. But if we already believe in oughts, I suppose meeting God doesn't hurt that belief.

I just think the circle isn't complete, the atheist who believes in moral truth doesn't get it from evolution, and the theist, IMHO, doesn't get it from God. True as existing maybe, but not true as justified.

But if you didn't mean to get into this, then forgive my tangent.

# posted by

Jay J : 1:04 PM

"In either case, evolutionary psychology on the one hand, and God on the other, finding out they were true shouldn't necessarily undermine belief in moral truth."

I really don't understand this statement.

First, here's my guess at what finding out "EP ... and God ... were true" might mean:

Based on the available evidence, discoveries to date in the field of EP best explain human behavior that is considered to have a moral dimension.

I assume, in keeping with the present discussion, that "moral truth" means something like "the existence of necessary moral propositions".

But presumably we think that a proposition like "human behavior X is moral" is our current best guess at a necessary moral proposition. EP discoveries may support that guess or not, but I don't see in what sense either eventuality could undermines moral truth as defined above. It would only undermine our confidence that our best guess is right.

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 2:40 PM

oops, of course "and God" should have been deleted in the above.

-c

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 2:43 PM

Let's just try the whole last paragraph again. There are several minor but critical errors:

But presumably we think that a proposition like "human behavior X is moral" is our current best guess at a necessary moral proposition. EP discoveries may support that guess or not, but I don't see in what sense either eventuality should undermine belief in moral truth as defined above. It should only increase or decrease our confidence that our best guess is right.

-c

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 2:57 PM

Jay: "I had also thought that you were saying that theism's advantage over materialism is that theism at least proposes a candidate for the justification of moral truth, and this candidate is God. My point is that I believe, even in principle, that God would not justify anything."

No, we're confusing epistemology and ontology here. When I say that statement p justifies statement q, I mean that we can infer q from p. So I don't think we can, without more, infer "our moral faculties reliably track moral reality" from "our moral faculties reliably track God's character." However, that doesn't mean that God's character doesn't operate, in fact, as the ontological foundation for what it is that our moral faculties reliably track. I'm (1) assuming up front that our moral faculties are reliable in tracking moral reality, (2) arguing that, if so, they need a truthmaker, (3) arguing that God's nature works better as a truthmaker for moral claims than anything in the materialist's ontology, and finally (4) noting that using God's nature as the truthmaker doesn't undermine our initial assumption that our moral faculties are reliable.

# posted by

Chris : 3:15 PM

"I'm ... assuming up front ..."

I think your assumptions are what threw me (and perhaps Jay) off. As m's understanding-inspiring (for me) comment argued, it's perfectly reasonable to lay out, as you did way back above, your premises and your conclusion. Then the only legitimate complaint would be with any faulty logic connecting them. But I find the premises so unlikely that it took me a long time (too long?) to understand that that's what you were doing. Eg:

There exist necessary moral propositions.

Even accepting this as true (a difficult step for me), I don't see why we should care unless we have access to them. To which you reply:

Assume our moral faculties (= moral inuition? Consistent terminology might help.) are reliable.

If by "reliable" you mean they guide us unerringly to necessary moral propositions, as has been noted by several commenters this is demonstrably false, so the assumption is counter to reality. Consider "gay sex is wrong." Whose moral intuition is reliable - the pros or the cons?

And if your answer is (as it seemed to be above) something like "it's reliable for each individual", isn't this moral relativism taken to an extreme?

Assume materialism can't include a necessary TM.

Why not - what aspect of your concept of materialism suggests that this is a reasonable assumption? In any event, why should we care if, as suggested in a comment or two above, materialists are a rare breed and arguably fools to boot?

I infer from your erudite exchanges with "m" that there are some subtlties raised by your hypotheticals, but why must they be raised on such seemingly skakey ground?

- Charles

# posted by

Charles T. Wolverton : 5:04 PM

"If by 'reliable' you mean they guide us unerringly to necessary moral propositions ...this is demonstrably false."

Generally reliable, but not infallible.

"Assume materialism can't include a necessary TM.Why not - what aspect of your concept of materialism suggests that this is a reasonable assumption?"

Material entities--and, more generally, physical entities--exist only contingently.

# posted by

Chris : 5:25 PM

Chris,

You're kind to say that WE'RE confusing ontology and epistemology here, since you could have said that it's me that's confused.

If you're assuming that moral claims have truth value, then finding the truth-maker, I don't see how your system has anything to do with the "is/ought" issue. You may agree, and say that this was what you were saying all along, but I was in part responding to your discussion of this in your original entry.

In your original entry, you responded to points made in Koppelman's post "Irrelevant God." The points you made in response to Koppleman had to do with the "is/ought" problem. So it seems I was wrong about what Tamanaha was saying, but that still leaves Koppleman's "Irrelevant God" post and it still leaves your response to this post when you discussed the "is/ought" problem.

I asked you earlier why God's will should be compelling on me, and you responded that I could do something against God's nature, but it would be wrong, then you referred me to your 5:21 post. I read this post and it seemed to rely on nothing more than your original assumption about moral realism. My claim that "oughts" cannot flow from God is the same as saying that God's nature can't, by itself, make anything wrong.

See it seems to me that in order for something to serve as a truth-maker for something normative, it's got to do the justifying. Not epistemic justifying, because that issue is on the shelf, since we don't know whether or not God exists, at least not publicly.

The type of justifying I'm talking about is moral justifying. God's existence, and his claim to have given us our moral intuitions, doesn't justify anything.

On the other hand, if we assume that moral sentiments exist, (but not necessarily as normative), then God's existence is not really different from the materialists sole reliance on evolutionary psychology. There is an origin in both cases, but neither does any normative justifying.

Your argument seemed to be that theism had an advantage over materialism, but if you're acknowledging that God doesn't justify anything morally, then I don't see how God makes morality normative any more than evolution does.

If you want to say that yes, God's nature does do the justifying, and respond that an impersonal law would be subject to the is/ought problem as well, that doesn't really answer the objection, since most here will agree that an impersonal law is subject to the same problems.

You say that "God's nature works better as a truthmaker for moral claims than anything in the materialist's ontology," but I just don't see how this is so.

Moral claims need normative justifying, not just explanations about origins. So it seems to me that you just can't successfully stiff-arm the issue of moral justification beyond your original assumption about moral realism.

You want to assume moral realism in step one, and that's fine, but when you say that a moral claim needs a truth-maker, you need a moral justification. You can't avoid this fact if you're saying that theism works better as a truth-maker than materialism, because materialism works just fine as an explanation of the existence of morality, but it doesn't do any normative justifying. My claim is that the same can be said about theism.

If you want to say that God is the ultimate origin of morality, and that it's not based on some other external moral law, then I have to say that theism and materialism are in the same boat, which is to say neither provides any normative justification.

Anyway, I just don't think you answered Koppelman on the is/ought objection just by pointing out that an impersonal law is subject to the same objection.

If you acknowledge this, and say that you're simply adding that God works as a truth-maker for morality, I must disagree with this too, since your God is the ultimate origin of morality.

If your God is simply the origin of morality, then materialists can point to origins too, so God's existence doesn't mean I "ought' to do anything, and you seemed invested in saying that it does place an obligation on me, at least at times in this exchange.

You may have an intuition that moral claims need truth-makers, and you may want to propose God as the truth-maker. However God doesn't serve this purpose. I can always say, "I want to do opposite of God's nature." Your response that I would be wrong is arbitrary, and this response is not justified by pointing to God.

Moral realism may need a truth-maker in order to remain viable, but I just don't think God is that truth-maker. Your point that by this standard, nothing could do any justifying is a good one, but it doesn't seem to help you as much as it puts everything else in the same boat.

# posted by

Jay J : 6:28 PM

"You say that 'God's nature works better as a truthmaker for moral claims than anything in the materialist's ontology,' but I just don't see how this is so."

The reason God's nature works better than evolutionary origins is that it exists necessarily, and necessary moral claims need necessary truthmakers.

# posted by

Chris : 7:07 PM

Chris,

You teach at Ole Miss law school right? Well I'm a big Arkansas Razorback fan.

What you're saying strikes me like this:

If both Arkansas and Ole Miss played Florida this year, and Arkansas lost 45-17, but Ole Miss lost 52-14, I guess I could say that Arkansas gave Florida a closer game, but it seems like little consolation, since we both failed pretty badly.

If God doesn't do the normative justifying, but provides the explanation, my belief is that it's like materialism's reliance on evolution.

I concede your point about evolution being contingent. I see that the necessity of morality and the necessity of God are both just sort of built into the system, so we're not arguing about that.

I'm taking up Koppelman's point that no "oughts" flow from God. You seemed to be interested in responding to this point earlier.

I suppose this may boil down to the fact that you claim, in your original entry, that is and ought coincide in your system. But this just attempts to solve the is/ought problem by fiat...by declaring that they coincide. I agree that a particularly sharp is/ought distinction would prevent anything else from serving as a moral truth-maker, but this just reveals the difficulty of all other systems, it doesn't help yours.

If I'm right that no "oughts" flow from God, or at least that your system doesn't provide any reason to think so, then the only advantage is that your system has a necessary being. But my point is that this being (even if it's a necessary being) doesn't provide the normative justification. So the fact that this being exists necessarily is still not morally compelling.

Maybe this analogy will work better:

If two people are interviewing for a job, and the employer wishes for the prospective employee to have 2 important qualities, and one of the applicants has 1, and the other applicant has none, I suppose one of the applicants was a better prospective employee.

Can we then talk about how one of the applicants was better at doing the job? Well, neither of them got the job.

We need a moral truth-maker to not only be a necessary being, but to do the justifying. This is why I think God does not get the job.

But I suppose it's true that God had one of the qualities while materialism had none.

However when you discussed the "is/ought" issue in your original entry and talked about how certain actions would be wrong at steps along the way, I had thought that you were asserting that God has both of the qualities we're looking for.

See I think God just can't do this job. I don't think "oughts" can flow from God, even in principle.

If this is right, then maybe both you and Koppelman are right: God does not provide a basis for normativity, and God gets closer than materialism.

And I also guess I agree with what you're saying, but only partially. I suppose, technically, God has more of the qualities we would need to justify morality than materialism does, so you've convinced me of that.

Nevertheless I think both materialism and theism fail to do the justifying a truth-maker for morality should. And therefore I don't think theism has a candidate which could fill the duties of a moral truth-maker.

If theism had a candidate, it would mean that this candidate had both qualities (both being necessary and that it does the justifying) and then the only question left would be whether or not God exists.

You could say that God's existence was an open question but that materialism can't make sense of normativity while theism at least has a candidate.

But see we can't say that if we find out that the applicant doesn't have what we need. We can say that the applicant with one quality got closer than the applicant with zero qualities, but we can no longer genuinely call either one of them a candidate.

# posted by

Jay J : 8:40 PM

Jay: "We need a moral truth-maker to not only be a necessary being, but to do the justifying. This is why I think God does not get the job."

For the record, I do think that God, by his nature, supplies conclusive reasons for action, or moral oughts. If morality is to have a basis at all, something has to be able to do that. The basic claim that God is the ground of morality is that getting to know enough about God will convince observers, unless they have made a mistake, that he is the highest good and supplies ultimate, conclusive reasons for action. God, on this view, is perfectly attractive and compelling to fully-informed moral subjects, though explaining why is far more complicated than merely noting that he is all-powerful and all-knowing. Whether the claim will be plausible will depend, of course, on how close the fit is between one's moral views and what turn out to be God's. If there is a close enough fit, it seems reasonable to react to God by saying, “Ah, yes, this is what I've been grasping at all along with my moral faculties—this is the being who, by his nature, gives me conclusive reasons for action."

So, here's the score, as I see it: could God, by his nature, supply reasons for action and undergird necessary moral claims? Maybe, if it turns out that he's close enough to the deliverances of our moral faculties, and we can explain the discrepancies if fully informed. Could an evolutionary process? No, because it's only contingent.

Whether God gives us what we need depends what you think we need. You've said you're not sure that moral truths exist, so you need (if you want to believe that they do!) a reason to think they do. I'm not saying that learning about God could convince you to believe in moral reality. But if you already believe in it, learning that he's the basis of it shouldn't necessarily be a problem, and it can satisfy a pretty pressing ontological concern.

# posted by

Chris : 6:10 PM

Chris,

Thanks for the give and take. It's helping me.

I'm taking an Ethics Seminar right now and I've actually thought allot about this topic, (meta-ethics in general), it's one of my favorites.

For the record, I will say that I'm probably a half moral realist and half moral skeptic.

I think that the best explanations for why we would always (in any universe) be emotionally de-edified by cruelty and psychologically "exalted" by goodness is found in Eastern Religions/Philosophies like Zen Buddhism and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism. This makes me a moral realist.

However the fact that I see no inter-personal responsibility as justified by these or any other systems makes me a moral skeptic by Western/Analytic standards.

I don't think God gave us any moral faculties that the universe (or consciousness) couldn't have also, and I don't think "human rights" exist in any sense other than in our ego mind.

In this way I suppose I find provisional agreement with emotivists like A.J. Ayer.

Also, I sometimes hear philosophy instructors say that David Hume viewed moral judgments as being no different than judging a work of art. This strikes me at first like it trivializes morality. But in a limited sense, I agree with Hume.

But the reason I agree with Hume is that I think the purpose of life (the teleology) is beauty. I don't mean only beauty in the sense of a woman or sunset or a mountain, although these things are partly related. I mean beauty also as being that transcendent feeling that Moses must have had on Mount Sinai, or the Buddha had upon enlightenment, or what many speak of at the birth of their children, etc, etc, etc.

I have to acknowledge that my alliance with emotivists like Ayer and...people like Hume is provisional. The legacy they left us with was a sort of lowered status of morality.

My claim is that if our assumptions had been more Eastern to begin with their work wouldn't have had this effect.

My "God" can be called several names...it's the 'Creativity' of Alfred North Whitehead, the 'Emptiness' of Zen Buddhism, the 'Thou Art That' of Advaita Vedanta, the 'Quality' of Robert Pirsig.

I've been through these loops in my head, over and over and over again, and I honestly believe that if morality is to have any infallible existential status, a personal god must be subject to it as well, but not only by "his/her/its" own nature, but by the nature of everything.

Of course, it doesn't make me right just because I have an obsessive mind that's chewed this topic to bits, I may very well be wrong.

The only reason I'm going into all this is that you've kind of put yourself out there, I know you haven't said what you personally believe, but most of us (including myself) have been sitting back critiquing your position without having to put anything of our own forward.

There's not really anything wrong with that, and I almost never do this, since disagreements have such a tendency to become acrimonious.

If I feel that my "opponent" is behaving in a dismissive, dishonest, or coy manner, I don't feel the need to do anything other than sit back and take negative positions.

But you've been patient and polite, and I think it may be fair to point out where I'm coming from.

My position is certainly one to be mocked by aggressive reductionist matieralists. I understand how counter-productive this is, and it's certainly not my goal to be dismissive of your argument. I'm not averse to metaphysical speculation in general, I only aim to use the same analytic spirit in these areas that I use in more "here and now" topics.

I'm sympathetic to the fact that binding morality needs a justification, and the only candidates are ones which give us transcendence.

If our only warranted beliefs are those which can be justified by methodological naturalism, then the bindingness of normativity ought to be viewed as a kind of fiction if the strong reductionist-materialist is to remain consistent.

Several atheists, in the course of all these threads about morality, have been gracious enough to acknowledge this. But others, like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etc seem to really believe in the inter-personal bindingness of morality. But how could they?

Well suffice it to say, if the common belief about the bindingness of morality went by the wayside, like they hope happens with religion, then their pseudo-intellectual lectures would lose their force.

Even intellectual warrant, (what we feel justified in believing), needs justification if one is to be a moral realist, and especially if one is the strong-aggressive materialist on par with Dawkins.

So I basically believe that in a way, it may be more rational to believe in a metaphysical truth-maker, which causes morality to be binding, IF one is going to live one's life as if morality is binding and believe that other's "ought" to do x,y, and z or believe certain things or think certain ways.

I think this advantage in rationality holds even if the truth-maker doesn't exist, because at least the theist actually has SOME explanation that they believe grounds morality. They need this if they're going to moralize to others about what to do. Aggressive reductionists seem to overlook this, yet they mock other people's beliefs, all the while having no good reason to moralize, since the whole concept would be seen as fictional by the consistent materialist.

If you take a look at Bloggingheads.tv any time soon, you'll see Michael Shermer in a diavlog. He is a very notable exception to the acrimonious atheist approach I've been speaking of. If you watch the video, I think you'll agree that he seems like a reasonable guy, so I don't automatically think ill of materialists, atheists, skeptics, etc.

I've gone on too long. I still hold my basic position, but you may notice that you've brought me over on some non-essential stuff, closer to your position.

I'll say a little more later, maybe at halftime of the LSU-Va. Tech game.

Jay

# posted by

Jay J : 8:42 PM

LSU is way ahead...24-0 at the half.

Anyway Chris, even though my intuitions stretch way beyond the confines of analytic philosophy, I must say that when something is claimed to be a truth-maker for morality, (Western-style morality with obligations and the like), it must do more than show that moral-ness somehow exists.

This applies for everyone, not only to one set of people, believers or not, moral realists or not. What I am saying is that even for you, even for anyone, God does not satisfy any ontological concerns about why anything is right or wrong.

If someone decides to believe that moral realism is true, fine. But in their search for a truth-maker, they should be sure to not only trace a genealogy of morality, but find a justification.

Even if they already believe in moral realism, they MUST find a justification if they are to claim that they have found a truth-maker for morality. This is how morality works, it's different from other kinds of...belief, the standard of justification is different, maybe even higher.

If they don't find a justification, they haven't found a truth-maker.

God is not a justification, no matter what his necessary nature is. It doesn't matter that someone already believes in moral realism, meeting God would not be a truth-maker for morality, it would only be a genealogy. This is not only true for me, it is true for everyone.

I know this may sound kinda arrogant, but it's just what it means to find a justification for morality.

If your response is that you already believe in moral realism, and that all you need after that is to meet God to establish the truth-maker, I must disagree.

Even if God is a necessary being, even if God's nature is necessary, God is not a justification for anything.

Right now we're studying Philippa Foot in Ethics. She's apparently an atheist, and also a ethical theorist. She says "we are not conscripts in the army of virtue, we are volunteers."

I find this statement of hers refreshing. It's another one of those statements that seems to eschew moral realism that I can partially agree with.

Foot identifies two ways in which people generally try to make morality binding,

1) There is in some sense a reason why we're obligated to do something unconditionally,

2) Morality is somehow inescapable.

See I don't hold view number 1, but I do hold view number 2.

I agree with her that we are not conscripts, but volunteers. No cosmic police will get you, nothing will really "happen" to you if you choose to be immoral.

However immorality has never, is not, and will never be the way to experience true beauty. I'm sure you know what this beauty is, the existence of it is not controversial to people who've experienced it.

No oughts flow from this system though, and that must be acknowledged.

Similarly, the fact that God is a necessary being with a necessary nature does not provide a justification.

Meeting this 'necessary being with a necessary nature' would add nothing in terms of justification to the belief in moral realism which was already held.

This is as true for you as it is for me, even if I grant God's necessary existence and necessary nature. Once again, theism may have more of the qualities (compared to materialism) needed for the job, but it can't be hired.

When you say truth-maker, and try to import this meaning into morality, you must acknowledge the task at hand. It's not simply tracing a history, it is providing a justification. The words you're using have a kind of public meaning, it can't be the case that their demands are satisfied simply because someone started out privately convinced of moral realism.

Of the two ways Foot described for morality to be binding, I suppose you could mount a case that in your system, morality is inescapable. After all, God created us right? And God can't change God's nature...so OK, if ya mess up, you're probably going to feel it, since God gave you your conscience. And if ya keep messing up, then you will be punished.

So OK, morality is inescapable in your system, good. This satisfies one of the ways Foot describes as establishing a sort of universal bindingness of morality.

But inescapability does not mean that something is morally obligatory. If it did, it would mean that might makes right.

Your system is not worse off than others, but it must be noted that when people say the word "wrong," they typically mean both senses of moral bindingness that Foot mentions. Your system does not provide obligation, which is half the requirement of the typical meaning of "wrongness."

If you're willing to say that the word "wrong" in your system reduces to something merely like,

"you could be cruel and violent and dishonest, but it would cause you to suffer, no matter what, since morality is inescapable,"

then I'm board and I see the system as coherent.

But I have the feeling that the vast majority of theists wouldn't be very happy with only this, like many in the East are.

If asked directly if the fact that one can't escape morality made one obligated, or responsible to follow God's nature, you would have to answer "no."

If asked if one "ought" to follow God's nature, you would have to answer, "Umm, oughts are justified in this system, but I certainly hope they follow God."

I just don't think you can stiff-arm the problem simply by proclaiming that you already believe in moral realism because the process of meeting God doesn't justify the previously held belief, and this is an objective fact, as true for you as it is for me.

Proclaiming that is and ought coincide is a similar non-justifying move. I think you're absolutely right that this is a problem for any other system hoping to justify "oughts," but this observation doesn't help your system.

Anyway, I seriously do appreciate the exchange, and I'm willing to listen some more. I'll be pretty busy over the next several days, so if I don't respond, I'm just tied up. Besides, I suppose we can only go round and round for so long...

Thanks again for the time,

Jay

Wow, LSU's winning 41-7 in the 4th quarter.

# posted by

Jay J : 12:30 AM

You consider the claim that torturing babies for fun is immoral to be true. You appear to do this, not by reference to god or his nature, but rather by rather on the basis of an intuition of yours. you are more certain of the truth of the above claim than you are of god's goodness (or existence), and if forced to choose between the two, you would abandon god. you therefore do not consider god to be a moral truthmaker: you consider "torturing babies for fun is immoral" to be true regardless of what a god-query might reveal. in fact, your claim that god, being constrained by his goodness, could not command such a thing as torturing babies for fun because doing so is immoral betrays your presupposition of the truth of the claim "torturing babies for fun is immoral" regardless of what god may have to say about it. if anything, you derive god's goodness by considering the possible edicts he might issue and verifying (against some other truthmaker that you apparently have access to independently of god) that each one is indeed good. if you truly believed god to be a moral truthmaker then you could not claim that god would not command X because is immoral -- rather, you would have to say "if god commands X then X must not be immoral".

# posted by

Unknown : 8:43 PM

Navid: "You consider the claim that torturing babies for fun is immoral to be true. You appear to do this, not by reference to god or his nature, but rather by rather on the basis of an intuition of yours ... you therefore do not consider god to be a moral truthmaker..."

We need to distinguish our epistemic access to a subject from what ultimately makes things about the subject true. I think we have access to moral truth without thinking about God, just like we can have access to truth about the morning star without thinking about the evening star. Now, I think that statements about the morning star are true in virtue of facts about the evening star. But that doesn't mean that, no matter what we could conceivably find out about the morning star and evening star, we would still think that this connection held. (See my 5:21 above for a story to that effect.) We might have beliefs about the morning star--for instance, that it appears in the morning--that we hold to more firmly than we do to the belief that the morning star is the evening star. But we can still have a very firm belief that the morning star is the evening star (and necessarily so)--that is, that the evening star is the truthmaker for claims about the morning star. Likewise, we might have beliefs about morality that we hold more firmly than we do to the belief that morality is grounded in God's nature. But we can still have a very firm belief that the truthmaker for statements about morality is God's nature (and necessarily so).

# posted by

Chris : 5:10 PM