Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Absolute objective morality?

Following on from my recent comments on the William Lane Craig tour, I feel the need to challenge the 'moral argument' for God.

The moral argument basically states that there are 'absolute objective morals' and these must originate from a transcendent being.

I agree with half of that. I'm just not sure that there actually are absolute objective morals.

So, if you believe there are, please tell me some.

Specifically, please leave a comment telling me some absolute objective morals that do not involve violence by one person on another.

From observation of these debates, the only 'absolute morals' specifically discussed involve violence among humans - generally the strong attacking the weak. But if there are absolutes, they can't only apply to humans, can they? So show me a non-violent absolute moral...

14 comments:

Jake said...

Hi Ricky,

A specific answer to your request: It's absolutely wrong to cheat.

But my 2 cents...virtually everybody lives as if morals are absolute. When faced with the Moral argument for God, atheists will deny this. But in their next breath they'll denounce radical Islam. See Dawkins.

Ricky Carvel said...

Interesting. To my mind 'cheating' has to be relative rather than absolute as it only applies relative to an agreed set of rules. Without some (arbitrary) rules definition, the concept of cheating is meaningless.

Jake said...

"Interesting. To my mind 'cheating' has to be relative rather than absolute as it only applies relative to an agreed set of rules. Without some (arbitrary) rules definition, the concept of cheating is meaningless."

I think you too quickly dismiss things as meaningless! =)

Merriam Webster defines cheat as:

1. to deprive of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud

So it's kind of a combination of lying and stealing, without any morally sufficient reason. Care to comment in this version of cheating?

But Also...

1b. to violate rules dishonestly

I still think cheating is absolute under this definition. And you in your response indicate why by saying "agreed set of rules". It doesn't matter what the rules are, only that we've agreed to them. Any violation of these rules is dishonest, stealing, and wrong.

If we were playing poker and you had a pair of kings and I pulled an Ace out of my pocket to make a pair of Aces. Would I be wrong to do this? Or could I defend myself by saying your poker rules are arbitrary?

Ricky Carvel said...

Poker rules are arbitrary. But cheating at poker is only cheating relative to those rules. You would be 'wrong' within the context of the game to cheat in that way, but I don't think you'd be morally wrong to do so. If the stakes were high it might seem like it, but if the stakes were low the whole thing would be 'just for fun' anyway and in some circumstances an audacious cheat might actually be entertaining - thus enhancing the fun.

More later...

Ricky Carvel said...

"But my 2 cents...virtually everybody lives as if morals are absolute. When faced with the Moral argument for God, atheists will deny this. But in their next breath they'll denounce radical Islam. See Dawkins."

I think you're slightly confusing two issues. Nobody here is arguing that there are no morals - the majority of people ("virtually everybody") live as if there is a moral code which is greater than they are. The issue is whether there are absolute morals - independent of time, place, circumstance, etc.

Even people who live by the 'honesty is the best policy' maxim would lie in certain circumstances. For example to protect their children from someone searching for them and intending to harm them.

The Webster's 1st definition is interesting, but that's not how I've always understood the word cheat - for me cheating is breaking the rules for personal gain, it is not necessarily depriving another of something. You can cheat a system, after all.

Your summation of this is also interesting:

"a combination of lying and stealing, without any morally sufficient reason"

I just gave an example of a morally sufficient reason for lying. I'm sure I could invent an equivalent morally sufficient reason for stealing too. So its likely I could contrive a scenario where there is a morally sufficient reason for a combination of lying and stealing. If that is cheating, and there is at least one scenario in which it is morally defensible, then it is not an absolute moral.

If you cheat someone (some villain, for example) in order to save your family from harm, then cheating is not - in itself - immoral. Its always relative to the scenario.

Now, you could go on to elaborate that really it is cheating the innocent that is the issue, but surely innocence itself is part of the scenario, not an objective absolute?

Jake said...

You said yourself that cheating is judged against an "agreed set of rules". So Poker rules are not arbitrary, and for any particularly game they are determined absolutely in advance.

Violating the rules is no less immoral that other forms of lying or stealing.

We seem to have a very different view of poker! Anybody who was caught cheating in game I've been a part of would at the very least, never be invited back.

What about insider trading? A CEO knows a large litigation is looming. He tells his brother to sell the stock short, profiting at expense of non-insider investors. Immoral? Or just enhancing the fun?

Jake said...

I think maybe we're wasting our time a bit here. You released the wild goose, and I ran after it.

The moral argument doesn't require "absolute" morals. Of course we live in a complicated world. It is not sufficient to simply say "Killing is wrong", "Lying is wrong", etc. The Bible doesn't say this either, not in totality. So nobody really believes this.

And it would be impossible to lay out every permutation, to get a list of absolute moral laws that people really do believe:

"It's right to kill if X, Y,Z.."
"It's wrong to kill if A, B, C..."

The moral argument requires objective morals. This means things are right or wrong without regard to my personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.

We can agree on a moral law "It's wrong to steal nutritious food out of the mouth of a starving child". Your rationale can be subjective (i.e. I want this child to live). And my rationale can be absolute (i.e. God commanded that we should love our neighbor).

It's not what you believe it's why.

Ricky Carvel said...

It's not what you believe it's why.

Are you sure?

The pilots who flew the planes into the twin towers on 9/11 probably believed that what they were doing was in accordance with the will of their god.

I bet they also had reservations about killing themselves and thousands of others, but they put these to the side because of their belief in their god.

If you believe that morality originates from a god, then what you believe to be morality is necessarily dependent on your perception of that god.

As someone (Steven Weinberg, not originally Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens who both use the line) once said: "Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion."

You seem to have come to the conclusion that objective morals are still scenario dependent. Even your example of the starving child could stretch a bit, as 'starving' is not an absolute. If the one doing the 'stealing' was more starving than the child, would it still be morally wrong?

I agree, there usually is a right and wrong thing to do in most circumstances, but these are not absolutes. What is right in some situations is wrong in others, and vice versa.

The moral argument for God rests on the assumption that there are hard and fast morals written into the fabric of reality by the creator God. But if all morals are scenario dependent, then I'm not sure this argument works.

That's not to say there is no creator God, or he has no morals, its just to say that the argument has holes and will probably never convince an atheist that there must be a God.

I have heard tales of many more Christians who have abandoned their faith as a consequence of not being able to reconcile the suffering in the world with the existence of God, than I have heard tales of atheists or agnostics who have been won into the kingdom by philosophical arguments.

As I've said previously, the function of these apologetics arguments is primarily to boost the faith / confidence of people who already have their minds made up. Thus, it doesn't need watertight arguments, what it needs is a show of confidence and even some smugness when its opponents fail to come up with good rebuttals...

Oh, and I don't play poker or otherwise gamble. Not because I believe it to be immoral (although my parents would have said that it was!), but because I have a good enough grasp of probability to understand that, on balance, everybody loses.

Jake said...

For simplicity, here's the argument from reasonablefaith.org

1. If objective moral values and duties exist, God exists.

2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.

3. Therefore, God exists.

To address your objections:

"The pilots who flew the planes into the twin towers on 9/11 probably believed that what they were doing was in accordance with the will of their god"

Were the actions on 9/11 wrong? The fact that you can even answer concedes premise 2.

"If you believe that morality originates from a god, then what you believe to be morality is necessarily dependent on your perception of that god."

The argument is on the ontology of morals (Is there right/wrong?) not epistemology of morals (How do we know what is right/wrong?). God doesn't change based upon our perception of him.

"Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion."

The only reason you can deem something good/bad in the moral sense, is that morals are objective.

"The moral argument for God rests on the assumption that there are hard and fast morals written into the fabric of reality by the creator God. But if all morals are scenario dependent, then I'm not sure this argument works."

Should morals be "hard and fast"? Are morals "written into the fabric of reality"? These are good questions, but not relevant to the argument.

"You seem to have come to the conclusion that objective morals are still scenario dependent. Even your example of the starving child could stretch a bit, as 'starving' is not an absolute. If the one doing the 'stealing' was more starving than the child, would it still be morally wrong?"

We agree that in any given situation, there is a right answer. That's premise 2 of the argument. The fact that we may not have perfect information to act upon it is beside the point.

"...and will probably never convince an atheist that there must be a God I have heard tales of many more Christians who have abandoned their faith as a consequence of not being able to reconcile the suffering in the world with the existence of God, than I have heard tales of atheists or agnostics who have been won into the kingdom by philosophical arguments"

I see no inconsistency between God and the existence of evil. Happy to discuss if you want, but this would not be an objection to premise 1, which i believe you conceded in your post.

"Oh, and I don't play poker or otherwise gamble. Not because I believe it to be immoral (although my parents would have said that it was!), but because I have a good enough grasp of probability to understand that, on balance, everybody loses."

Sorry, i picked a bad example then!

Ricky Carvel said...

1. If objective moral values and duties exist, God exists.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.


That is too simple a statement of the problem. I have issues with both those premises, as stated.

Lets start with number 2, though.

I think that in any circumstance I find myself in there may be a 'right' choice for me and a 'wrong' choice. To be entirely objective, the 'right' and 'wrong' options must be the same if you take me out of there and put any other person in. In fact I think to be truly objective, you have to go beyond 'person' to any other 'moral agent'.

The thing is, I can conceive of situations where what would be right for me would not be right for someone else, based on the difference between my presuppositions / worldview and theirs. So the problem here is the word 'objective'.

Regarding point 1, I think that is flawed and not a logical statement. It, at the very least, needs a very rigorous definition of 'God'.

If objective moral values and duties exist, then they must originate from somewhere. That is the argument. That the somewhere must be God is another stage in the argument which is entirely missing in WLC's case. I would only argue that the somewhere must be something greater than the individual person. It need not be an omni-anything, divine, creator being.

So, to summarise:

1. If objective morals exist, then there must be something greater than the individual.
2. Objective morals appear to exist, some of the time, therefore
3. Something greater than the individual appears to exist, some of the time.

Its not a great argument, is it?

***

I also don't have a problem with God and evil coexisting, for given values of God and evil. The problem comes when you start defining God as all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing. Given that there is suffering, and an awful lot of it, my conclusion is that God, whoever and whatever he is, cannot be all those things. He must have limitations. But that's a discussion for another thread...

Jake said...

"I think that in any circumstance I find myself in there may be a 'right' choice for me and a 'wrong' choice [for somebody else]"

I think just indicates that you don't believe in objective morality. But where does this leave you? You could never judge any actions.

In the States recently, it has come to light that a college athletic department has been covering up the molestation of children by a member of their football coaching staff. I can condemn this because God has indicated that sexual relations should only be had in a marriage relationship. However, what can you say? Well, the guy wasn't Christian. He must adhere to some Greek paganism where these relationships are OK. So based upon his worldview it's OK.

Merriam Webster defines objective as:
3a expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations

This is the definition Craig uses. There are some other definitions ( I think irrelevant) but none that require independence from context as you're defining it.

"Regarding point 1, I think that is flawed and not a logical statement. It, at the very least, needs a very rigorous definition of 'God'."

Why would the definition need to rigorous? All that's needed here is God be a self-sufficient moral authority.

If objective moral values and duties exist, God exists.

If p, then q. All you have to do to refute this to show that objective moral values and duties can exist without God. Which you have not done or really attempted.

"The problem comes when you start defining God as all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing. Given that there is suffering, and an awful lot of it, my conclusion is that God, whoever and whatever he is, cannot be all those things."

So how much suffering would be consistent with an all-lowing, all-powerful, all-knowing God? A little bit less? A lot less? None? Wouldn't you need God-like knowledge to make this determination?

"He must have limitations."

Depends on what you mean. He can certainly do anything that's possible. I don't think it's reasonable to expect Him to do the impossible.

Ricky Carvel said...

If objective moral values and duties exist, God exists.

If p, then q. All you have to do to refute this to show that objective moral values and duties can exist without God. Which you have not done or really attempted.


No. If objective moral values and duties exist, then there must be a source for these values and duties. I can see no logical reason why the source must necessarily be the creator of the universe, or have the ability to predict the future, or be the judge of mankind, or be in any way connected to the death of Jesus Christ. And yet many Christians and apologists simply assume these connections.

The source of morality, if there is one, need not have many of the attributes that I'm sure you lump into your definition of God.

So point 1 of the argument is flawed, because it leaps from the possible existence of a higher moral agent to the certain existence of an infinitely higher moral agent.

Jake said...

"No. If objective moral values and duties exist, then there must be a source for these values and duties. I can see no logical reason why the source must necessarily be the creator of the universe..."

If the universe has some ultimate naturalistic cause, then I see no reason to believe that objective moral values or duties exist. If the universe has a supernatural cause, that cause is what we refer to as God. It seems absurd to say that God created everything in the universe except moral values and duties, something else did that.

Explain to me how objective morals could exist without God. Or how God could create the universe and not create moral values?

"or have the ability to predict the future,..."

I think omniscience is key characteristic to having moral authority.

"or be the judge of mankind..."

Without ultimate accountability there are no moral duties. Why would anything other than the source of morality be the judge upon the moral agents?

"or be in any way connected to the death of Jesus Christ. And yet many Christians and apologists simply assume these connections."

Not Dr. Craig. That's why he presents the cosmological and historical arguments. Watch the Sam Harris debate. Harris tries to make it "the moral argument for Christianity" but it's not.

Ricky Carvel said...

Whoa. You're responding to my comments before I've even responded to all of your last lot of comments. I still had more to add...

Maybe later.