A Challenge to the Moral Argument (Pt. II)

In yesterday's post we outlined one version of the moral argument for the existence of God. It goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

We also mentioned that in a debate with theistic philosopher William Lane Craig, atheistic philosopher Erik Wielenberg challenged the first premise of the argument and therefore rejected the conclusion.

Wielenberg's challenge was packaged in a series of three questions:

1. Why think that only Divine Commands are sufficient by themselves to generate moral obligations?
2. How can God's commands impose obligations on those who are unaware of divine authority behind such commands?
3. Why would God command people to do things He knows they won't do anyway, since issuing such commands only introduces pointless evil into the world?

Quite apart from Craig's response, I'd like to venture a reply myself to Wielenberg's questions.

Taking them in order, I understand Wielenberg to be asking in #1 why there could not be other sources of moral obligation besides God. Why, he's asking, must we think that only God is a sufficient source of moral duty?

In reply it seems appropriate to ask what else could be an adequate source of moral obligation if not God? Several possibilities may perhaps suggest themselves: Social consensus, evolution and collective human reason are three, but there are serious shortcomings with each of these.

If the consensus of a society serves as a moral authority then, as was argued in yesterday's post, whatever a society deems to be right is right. Thus, if a society countenances slavery, oppression of women or child abuse those things would be morally proper.

Furthermore, if someone were to dissent and insist that slavery, say, is wrong, and if the dissenter happens to be in the minority in his or her society, then the dissenter must of necessity be holding a morally incorrect opinion. The dissenter is wrong by definition. The consensus of society is otherwise, and if the consensus is right ab defino then the minority opinion is always wrong.

And, if that's so, how would a society ever experience moral improvement since moral progress is almost always initiated by people holding a minority opinion?

Well, what about the evolutionary possibility? It's sometimes argued that we have evolved traits like sympathy for our fellow human beings and that we're therefore morally obligated to treat others sympathetically or kindly, but it's hard to see how this conclusion follows from the premise.

The fact that a behavioral trait has evolved is hardly a reason to consider ourselves morally obligated to behave accordingly. After all, as philosopher David Hume pointed out 250 years ago, just because human beings are a certain way, it doesn't follow that we should be that way.

In addition, if behavioral traits are the products of evolution then selfishness, male aggression and male dominance of females, among other unsavory aspects of human nature, are all evolved traits. Should we therefore consider ourselves obligated to be selfish, violent and oppressive?

And if all our behaviors have the same evolutionary provenience how do we arbitrate between our sympathy for others and our contempt for others? Why is sympathy right and good and contempt wrong and bad if evolution has produced them both?

Finally, we might ask how a blind, impersonal process like evolution could ever impose a moral obligation upon us in the first place. Obligations can only be imposed by personal beings with minds. Impersonal processes like natural selection and genetic mutation cannot make selfishness and greed, violence and hatred, morally wrong, nor can they forbid them and impose on us a duty to refrain from them.

Some would argue that human reason is the source of moral obligation, but it's difficult to see how human reason can impose a duty to do something like sacrificing one's goods to help anonymous poor people in a distant continent. Why would I be wrong to refrain from helping those people? What does it even mean to say that it would be wrong not to help them?

Human reason seems to me to lead not to some Kantian kingdom of ends in which we act in ways that we would want all people to act. Rather reason tells me to put my own interests first, ahead of the interests of others. The moral imperative produced by a secular human reason is "Look out for #1."

Indeed, another atheist philosopher, the Canadian Kai Nielsen expressed deep disappointment with the inability of philosophers to find a way to base a moral system on reason:

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons, unhoodwinked by myth or ideology, need not be individual egoists or amoralists….Reason doesn't decide here….The picture I have painted is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me….Pure reason will not take you to morality.

Richard Rorty, also an atheistic philosopher, declared that:

...if you do not believe in God you would do well to drop notions like “law” and “obligation” from the vocabulary you use when deciding what to do.

Very well, then, but about Wielenberg's questions #2 and #3?

We'll consider those next week.